I wanted to post extended rants about all of this stuff, but I got busy so I'll just post some micro-rants instead.

First off, I'm getting a 4% clickthru rate on my ad. Not .0004%, four percent. one out of every 25 people who see my ad click on it. I have the best ad in the history of banner-ads!

Okay, probably not that lofty. My little Flash ad-service, MochiAds, has just added a new feature where you can upload your own ad, and they'll rotate through those ads in the unsold slots. I uploaded my ad last week and I'm getting a 4% click-through.

Of course, it's a bit well-targeted, as it's an ad for Flash games that plays during a Flash game.

Here's the ad. Discuss its merits. . .





Meltdown is almost done. I just need the playback app and links and some tweaks to the gameplay and it'll be up. You'll like it.



I'm rethinking the whole bit about protecting my games. In the past, I'd taken some pains to avoid theft of my Flash, because Flash-theft is pretty rampant. If you don't make a little effort in your Flash to prevent it appearing on another site, it probably will.

So I have some stuff to protect things. The games register themselves with my site at the beginning. And they watch the URL that launches 'em. And some other stuff. I removed a couple of things that reduced my compatibility, like my script that breaks out of frames and SWF-encryption, but I've been fairly lucky. Apart from a couple of zillion-game sites running my games in a frame, I've not been stolen.

But now that the ads are making me a little bit, I'm thinking that I should wipe out all of my protections and let people steal my Flash stuff willy-nilly. After all, as long as the ads display, I'll make money on it. And the panel at the end will always send you to thecodezone.com.

So now I'm working towards that end, removing the protection.

The biggest problem with running my games on other pages is that there's no documentation. And a couple of my puzzles need documentation. So I'm adding a "help" button in the Flash rather than putting the docs below 'em.



SWX is pretty cool, but I didn't have much need for it. It's yet-again-still-another way for Flash to talk to PHP nicely. I'm using AMFPHP to do my host communication, which works very well, and I wasn't up to doing change for change's sake. SWX, though, has one big advantage over AMFPHP, which is that it doesn't require the Flash Remoting components on the client side. In addition to lightening up my stuff by about 10k, getting rid of Remoting has another advantage, which is that Flash Lite (i.e. Flash for cellphones) doesn't support Remoting.

So if I switched to SWX, there's be little to prevent me from porting the games to cellphones, and they could use the same back-end code as the existing games.

And having the ability to play Daily Puzzles or check scores on your cellphone would be pretty cool. So I'm gonna keep an eye on SWX. If it works out, I'll probably switch.