The reason is simple: the blog is growing in popularity breaking into Alexa top 20,000 and it’s a developer blog, not a collection of tutorials.

For this reason, I don’t want to publish ads suggesting software I would never use or games I would never play.

This would be a cheap way to monetize traffic by directing readers who trust me to sites I don’t even know. And in the end Adsense or BuySellAds show the same ad on thousands different sites, making all sites look the same.

Last but not least, ads take space which could be used for showing useful information.

Placing ads on a blog means if I want to put a FlashPunk banner because I think FP rocks and I want to suggest it to my readers, I simply can’t… because I know FP is not willing to give me money for it and it would not be fair to place a free ad next to paying ads. It would be like a shop where you pay to buy goods and the guy next to you does not.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people asking me which software should they use, like in this tweet:

I suggested Flare3D because it’s the one I like most although they do not pay me to promote it. In the same way there’s a comment talking about purchasing a Flare3D license in this post and I receive questions about which software to use more than daily, by email, Facebook private messages or other means.

I cannot drive developers to use software I do not use just because someone paid me to do it. There’s my full name in this blog.

Placing ads is not the only way to monetize a blog, and I want to give my two cents about the most popular ways:

* Asking for donations: which in most cases means begging for money with sentences like “I would like to keep on blogging but my hosting plan costs so much, oh, please give me money”. This looks quite unprofessional, I plan to add a “donate” button but just saying something like “being a geek means drinking a lot of coca-cola, buy me a coke can”, with some humor in it and above all without complaining about hosting plans to pay.

* Selling tutorials/source codes: this could be done but it would be unfair to people living in some Countries which average income is extremely low or do not have access to payment systems like Paypal. I don’t want to deny access to Iranian geeks just because they live in a sanctioned Country.

* Selling subscriptions plans: this way is very similar to the above one, and I won’t apply it.

* Joining affiliate programs: this could be an idea but it can be something I really use and would recommend even if I would not earn any money. That’s the case of MochiAds which I recommend with a referral link but it’s a service I highly recommend and use for almost every game I make.

On the other hand, I need the blog income to buy some stuff which will allow me to keep on blogging about new technologies such as iPhone/iPad game development (that’s $3,588 to buy a 17” MacBook Pro in Italy, and I already have iPhone and iPad), Unity development (starting from $800 to $4,500 according to the “PRO” addons), Android development ($845 for Samsung Galaxy S II). That’s more than $8,000 that I would need just to begin talking about such topics.

* The final idea: I am going to place banners of sites and products I really like, use and recommend, mailing to the companies saying honestly something like “I really love your software and I recommend it to my readers for free. Anyway, sponsor my blog if you like the job I am doing”. Also, I’ll evaluate sponsorship proposals as usual, but I will choose only the ones which meet the above ctieria.

Finally, as Wikipedia does, I will accept private donations, and donors will be mentioned in an apposite page.

Shouldn’t I raise the 8K bucks in a short time, I’ll buy the software/hardware using other sources of income and keep on blogging with no ads/no supporters, with complete independence.

PS: my hosting plan costs around $14/month so don’t believe people asking for thousand dollars for dedicated servers when they only run a small site :)

From now on, I’ll start posting on Twitter at least twice a day, with everything which cannot fit into a blog post.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/triqui.

Hope you will follow me.

There’s no need to say 5 years in the world of blogging is an Age, just like the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, the last five years have been the Geek Age.

While I can’t tell you what will happen during the next 5 years (but I’d bet we will be using some kind of iWhatever made by Apple), I will try to do my best to provide quality posts and tutorials.

Look, this is a screenshot of the oldest version of the blog.

I would also like to change the way I use advertising on the blog to generate income. I have a couple of ideas in mind.

Anyway, let me write a new tutorial…

Uh, if you want to buy the blog a cake, my paypal email is triqui[at]libero.it

If you donate, I’ll buy the cake and post it on the blog.

Being such a niche blog, it’s an awesome milestone, and it’s also a sign of an increasing interest in indie game development.

I just want to thank YOU the readers.

Let me make a small recap:

August 18, 2008: top 50K

May 31, 2009: top 40K

October 19, 2009: top 30K

April 27, 2011: top 20K

Hope I will be talking about a top 15K soon.

Thank you again.

Any feedback is welcome, anyway… don’t forget I will release the final theme for free so if you have suggestions or weird requests, don’t hesitate.

Look at this screenshot:

Suggestions are welcome, since obviously once finished the theme will be released for free after a series of tutorials.

Some days ago I told you to take a look at this video to test Wistia‘s reports, and here they are my considerations:

First, uploading the video was quick and easy as if you were uploading a video on YouTube or Vimeo. Embedding is also that easy, but what makes Wistia different than YouTube is the video tracking analytics.

Starting from the summary, you can see it’s not just a “total plays”, but shows the page loads, the number of visitors, the video plays and there’s even a chart showing the video timeline and giving you a summary how people watch your video.

This is very interesting in case you are making a screencast and want to know if people finish your lesson, or quit it at a certain point.

Then, you have a detailed log of each visitor, along with Country and IP address, with an heatmap giving you a visual spectrum of how each individual watches your video.

The more a visitor watches the video, the more the heatmap turns to read. Useful to see if people replay your screencast, and what they are watching with more interest.

Prices start at $39 per month with 100GB of bandwidth, heatmaps and analytics but you can try it for free for 15 days without using any credit card.

While it’s not the solution for the average blogger, Wistia in my opinion is a must have for bloggers with a private area where people can see featured screencasts. Since they’re paying to watch your videos, you need to know if your screencast are receiving the right interest.

As you can imagine, writing a book it’s way different than writing a blog, and although the topic is the same (Flash game programming), there are quite a lot of things you should consider.

The following is a list of some big differences between writing for a blog and writing a book:

1) Nothing other than text and images allowed

This probably does not matter if you write topics which don’t need much more than a photo to be explained. For instance, if you write a history book, you can explain everything just with text and photos. When you write about programming, unfortunately you haven’t the “click to see the working example” and the “download button”. Obviously in the electronic version you can provide all these nice features, but what about people reading the printed book, or the pdf version on an ebook reader device?
You have to provide clear images for every step, clearly showing what’s moving and why it’s moving, what’s happening and why it’s happening.

2) No immediate feedback

When you publish a post, if you have a good traffic, in a couple of hours you’ll have some technical feedback. Readers will comment the post. This means you can quickly edit and update it following readers’ suggestions, that in some cases are most interesting than the post itself. When you send a draft chapter, only a couple of technical reviewers will read it, and this will take from three to five days. Moreover, there are technical times such as editorial approval. In the end, you’ll receive the feedback on a chapter several days after you submitted it (at the moment I am writing chapter 10 and got only first 4 chapters reviewed), giving you a little headache to focus on a topic you aren’t working on for several days.

3) No updates

Unlike a blog post that can be updated anytime and how many times you need, once a chapter is submitted you have one of two more times to update it before it’s ready to be printed. From that moment on, the chapter is to be considered “as is”.

4) You’re not at home

When you write a post, basically you are inviting readers to your house. Imagine them in your living room, listening to you. When people buy your book, you are invited into readers’ houses, in their living room. You have to be more polite and formal, without being too different than the guy readers know from the blog. You don’t want people think you aren’t the real author of the blog.

5) There’s a strict timeline

When you blog, although you should post at a constant interval such as every two or three days, there’s nothing bad if you take one more day to refine the post. When you write a chapter, normally there’s a timeline to respect, so you aren’t free to take your time to improve the chapter as many times as you want. Unlike a site which is always “under construction”, a chapter must be definitively completed.

I am learning a lot from the making of this book, and I will share my experiences as much as I can.

I hope this can help all bloggers willing to write a book or an ebook.

The blog had 77 posts in the first year, 187 in the second one and 237 on the 3rd and 218 this year for a total of 719 posts!!

While keeping a blog up and running (and growing) for 4 years is quite a milestone, you have know it’s not easy to make 719 posts easily searchable and accessible to readers.

I am thinking about some kind of redesign but I’m in a little trouble because at the moment I can’t figure out how to list all interesting posts in a sidebar, or somewhere around the site, in a clear way. Also I would like to put emphasys on series, with all steps listed in sequence.

Any clue?

In this photo, my travelmates

Let’s see them:

1) An iPhone, with some interesting apps to kill some time during a 11 hours flight

2) Sony Bloggie camera. High definition MP4 video, 5-megapixel still photos, USB arm, 270-degree swivel lens. Apart from that, decent videos with a pocket camera

3) Electric plug adapters… because sometimes batteries need to be recharged

4) Olympus TOUGH-3000… 12 Megapixels, waterproof to 3m, shockproof to 1.5m and freezeproof to -10°C (quite useless in Cuba anyway…)

5) Sony Handycam full HD with 40Gb hard disk… bigger than the Bloggie but with a lot better video quality… for the “really interesting events”

6) Nintendo Dsi + Zelda Spirit Tracks… you know… an 11 hours flight…. back and forth…

7) 16Gb USB Key… with all my stuff

8) Internet key… because I hate to wait at the airport (and no, no free WiFi in Italy)

9) Entry level MacBook Pro… I still don’t love Macs… but I don’t hate them anymore

10) The camera used to take this shot… a Sony Cybershot

11) A Lonsdale backpack to make all this stuff fit without problems

These are my travelmates. I would like to know yours