To My Readers
Readers, I’d like to sincerely thank you for reading my blog. Without an audience, none of this writing could be possible. Thanks for all the support you’ve given me and my site over the past year.
Today marks my blog’s 200th post. My posts have been read by over 100,000 different people, who viewed over 500,000 pages of my site and commented more than 300 times.
To celebrate, I thought I would get my readers more involved in my blog. So I’ve come up with a couple questions for you.
1) What type of articles interest you the most?
Over the course of my writing, I’ve come up with a lot of post ideas; ranging from sponsorships and monetization to game design and development. What categories of posts interest you the most? Are there any specific posts you would like to see me write?
2) What posting schedule do you think I should have?
I’ve been working hard to come up with new, unique posts for you everyday of the week. What I want to know is, how often do you think I should be posting? Do you find it hard to keep up with my posting schedule, or is it fine the way it is?
3) What do you think of my site design and usability?
Freelance Flash Games is run using WordPress, meaning it’s pretty flexible with themes and plugins. What do you think of my current theme and the usability of my site? Is it hard to find your favorite posts? What could use work?
4) How would you like to be more involved within my site?
It would be great to have a community of developers centered around Freelance Flash Games, all looking to help each other and advance their game development skills. How can I give you more chances to be involved?
5) Anything else you want to comment on?
If there’s anything else you want to tell me about, feel free.
I know I’ve got at least over 150 readers subscribed to my RSS feed, so I expect some comments here. I can’t better my site for you if you don’t voice your opinion. So get over your commenting shyness and give me your best ideas ;)
Related posts:
June 26th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I like your site very much and drop by every day! Most articles don’t present to holly grail or anything new, but this is also not needed. Often they remind me on something and after reading I think “yep, that guy is right, have to take care for this”. What would be nice would be more detailed info on mentizing games, studies what others did to make money etc. (maybe that’s due to the fact I earn my living with game developing).
In short: I like your blog a lot, can be improved a bit, it’s one of my favorite blogs and Top 5 Blogs I read nearly every day. Keep up the good work :-)
June 26th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Let’s see if I can help…
1. Don’t focus on certain things, that’s the good thing about this blog. It’s generic yet interesting. I read your blog for sometime and for you to have an idea, I was under the impression that it was a team of gamedev journalist, hobbying in the flash market. So… why change your editorial choices?
2. I speak for myself, having a schedule to blog kills my blogs. So write when you want, or schedule or something, just don’t it because you HAVE to meet a deadline.
3. It’s good and easy in my opinion, from my big dual-monitors to my tiny laptop.
4. I don’t know really… but if we can get involved, we will. Actually the first cross blog topic we had was with you just some days ago and we are all pro-dev-community stuff.
5. Not really, just keep up the good job.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I like the TIPS for making better games
(power-up lists, ideas, advices,…)
June 26th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Congrats on the steady growth of your blog mate, it’s well deserved.
3) What do you think of my site design and usability?
I’ve got an idea about that ;)
June 26th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Hey man, I come back to your blog probably every second day or so and the only thing i think you could change is maybe have a forum so people could share their bits of code, get help if they need it and ask people if there is anything that they should change in their games.
If there was a really cool example or something cool you could always make a post about it so everyone can see what they have done.
Anyway have fun and i hope the blog keeps going well!
June 26th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
As one of those 150 RSS readers I thought I’d comment:
1) What type of articles interest you the most?
I’ve enjoyed reading the full spectrum of article topics you post. I don’t want any one thing in specific.
2) What posting schedule do you think I should have?
Since my RSS feed lights up whenever you post it doesn’t matter to me the schedule. Your blog is one of many dev blogs I follow so it is better to me to have something worthwhile to read rather than something on an arbitrary deadline. Post ‘em when ya got ‘em.
3) What do you think of my site design and usability?
I’ve made good use of your ‘related articles’ links at the bottom. Those alone have kept me on your site far longer than I’ve meant before. I find the site very usable and don’t really have any issues with it.
4) How would you like to be more involved within my site?
I don’t comment too often but I will speak up if I feel I’ve got something to add or a question.
5) Anything else you want to comment on?
Keep up the great work! Also, what is your first name… it would make it more personal for me to know a little bit more about who you are if you want to share any tidbits. At least a first name… ;) Seriously though, I enjoy your blog and congratulations on the growth!
-Dave
June 27th, 2009 at 9:00 am
First poster, thanks. I’ll try to throw a post or two in on monetizing games. I’ve been meaning to do an interview lately, so maybe I’ll try to interview a successful developer.
Vlad, I appreciate it. I’ll try to keep a different mix of articles going on here. And I’ll try to keep the daily schedule, but if I miss a day or two hopefully it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.
Mauricio, tips are some of my favorite posts to make, so there will definitely be more of them in the future.
Thanks Squize, I’m interested to see what your final design will be.
Stephen, thanks for all the support. I’ll ask around to try to find a forum software that isn’t spammy and a resource hog (could be tough though).
HydridMind, I’m glad to have on of my RSS readers commenting. It seems most of you like my mixed variety of posts, so I’ll be sure to keep that up. I changed my related posts algorithm to speed up my site, but it came at the cost of worse related posts. So I’ll see what I can do about making them better suggestions.
Since you asked, I first chose the name director because I didn’t like the generic admin name that most site owners took. Thus I went to a handy thesaurus, and came up with director. The name stuck for the site and I’ve been using it since.
To the rest of you, I expect some comments. Over 60 of you viewed this page so far, yet only 6 were brave enough to comment? You don’t need to answer all the questions, just give me some input.
Thanks,
Ryan
June 27th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I like your blog a lot, thanks for taking the time of read us to improve it too! I’m looking for a new host, who is your hosting provider? your site loads incredible fast to me.
June 27th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Derek, thanks for the comment. I’m using DownTownHost as my hosting provider. I just switched last week and it’s been great so far.
The load time could also have to do with the way your blog is configured (plugins, theme, etc.) as well.
June 27th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
1) I really like all the blog posts you put on your blog. It’s very focused, so I tend to read up on everything you are writing. Most of what I really look at tends to be industry and market news related.
2) I think that at least once a week is an “active” blog.
3) To be honest, I really like your layout. It was one of the reasons I’ve been seriously thinking of redesigning my own blog – especially with black text on white for readability and the ease of layout.
4) Honestly, this is one of the harder questions that I’ve also pondered on my site as well. It’s how you can be more than just a news poster – but a community as well. I’m not sure how I’d like to get more involved on the site. It’s just great to know that we all share stories and aspirations as indies.
June 28th, 2009 at 2:38 am
Hi Ryan,
i am addicted to your blog, mostly i visits more than once while i know, it mainly updated about every second day. and i think it is my about 10th visit to this particular post because i want to know what others say and suggest.let me input some suggestion,may be you like it..:)
1) What type of articles interest you the most?
obviously monetization tips, sponsorship articles and enhancement of game via power ups,micro transactions related articles.
apart from that i would like to see some gaming tutorial and postmortem of successful flash games.
2) What posting schedule do you think I should have?
actually current schedule “A new post in alternate days” is fine. and actually this blog is all about quality of articles, no of articles doesn’t matter.
3) What do you think of my site design and usability?
actually studioPress theme is one of the best theme, it’s just OK. it will be better if there is a logo in header rather than Simple Text.A Logo represent a visual and more appealing representation of your blog. also better if you have a favicon.
4) How would you like to be more involved within my site?
yes i want to actively participate on discussion and wants to reply to threads. i think a discussion forum may be best like guides.freelanceflashgames.com. just a example though. also you can ask to your readers for some article’s and publish in this blog in there behalf. this gives them recolonization and feels proud.
5) Anything else you want to comment on?
because i love your blog and a loyal reader, i would like to spread this blog to more newcomer game developers. try to monetize a little bit more like pusing your every post into social bookmarking websites like dzone,digg,del.icio.us, stumbleupon etc.while these seems panic and time consuming but is worth as it send some extra traffic into blog, pushing your alexa site ranking.
Hmmmmm,
that’s nothing all, because improvement is a regular process like journey.
Regards,
Manoj Sahu
June 28th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Thanks Paolo. I actually kind of got the idea for this post from you. I knew I needed to do something special for my 200th post, then I remembered your post to your readers and though “What a great idea for my 200th, I’ll make it to my readers.”
Thanks for being a loyal visitor Manoj. I’ll have to get some developer success stories on here, that way you guys can see what worked and what didn’t. I keep meaning to make a logo, I’ll try to work on it today. I’m considering a forum, but I’ll have to research which ones aren’t memory intensive on my server and can be kept relatively spam free. Thanks for the help.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I like some of the tips for good game design and lists of ideas, but:
* No way am I reading a list of 40-50 things that’s not subdivided & categorized somehow!
* Some of the lists seem geared toward making clones of every other game out there. For instance, how many elements listed appear in really innovative games like MULE or Katamari Damacy?
Also “previous page” and “previous entries” being different is confusing.. I think everyone reading blogs understands what just previous & next mean.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Thanks for the input Regis. I’m not sure which list you are talking about, but the lists are there to help anyone that wants them. I try to keep them generic so that they can be used in any game. Making them to focused on one specific game type wouldn’t appeal to most of my readers, since most are working on different types of games. They’re more of a resource than an article to read.