Alexa rank under 40K!!!

About a year after being one of the top 50,000 sites in the world, the blog now is one of the 40,000 most visited sites in the web.

That’s an awesome result for a niche blog like this one, and obviously this motivates me to continue posting more and more stuff.

3 years of blogging

Ladies, gentlemen and geeks, today the blog is three years old!!!!!

The blog had 77 posts in the first year, 187 in the second one and 237 this year for a total of 501 posts (and none of them is off-topic… no “got a new sofa” post in this blog).

More than 2,000,000 people visited the blog during the last year.

Now, let’s jump into the 4th year… I am open to any kind of suggestion.

And, last but not least…

THANK YOU

Facepalm – when having a backup is not enough

If you are a regular reader, probably you noticed during the last days I went from about 5 posts per week to 3 posts/week.

I didn’t plan to give up blogging, and I didn’t run out of inspiration… I have a lots of things to write, but lately I find the blog to be too slow, so I thought it would be due to a server upgrade and waited a couple of days.

Yesterday I was writing an interesting article about a new project I started with an important partner (you will find it tomorrow) when I got the 500 internal server error.

Never mind, let me close the page and open it again. 500 again.

Ok, so I deleted the entire site and uploaded the backup.

500…

Ok, maybe something happened to the database, let me check it and back it up.

I wasn’t able to back up the database… I was only able to perform select queries… update, delete, insert and other writing queries gave me errors… and still, of course…

500…

At that time, having a backup was not enough. What’s the point in having a backup if you can’t back it up?

While I was thinking, and the site was softly displaying

500…

Never mind, I was lucky enough to have another database on the same server, so I switched the databases and the site was up and running again.

But the administration panel was still in 500 error. Probably the same issue that screwed the database caused problem to the disk.

I had to delete all files once again and upload them, and finally the site is running.

But I am a quite afraid at the moment, so I am writing this post using the notepad

Obviously I opened a ticket to the customer care, and they answered this way (translated from italian)

we found your DB (dbname) having a table (tablename) with some spam records [so what?]. This causes problems when making queries on such tables [really?].
So we renamed (tablename) to (new tablename)… you are invited to clean the DB blah blah blah

So, forget what probloggers say. Having a backup is not enough.

During your life as a blogger, you will have to face weird errors and stange support teams.

Did it happened to you once or twice?

Now I pasted the post in WP dashboard… 3… 2… 1… Publish (pray)

New blog header: how did I make it

During the weekend I played with the blog header.

In my opinion bloggers understimate the power of a rich header, and in most cases you will see only the blog title and description.

I am going to show you what I did on my header, why I did it and how can you do it on your own.

Pages first

The first thing included in the header is the navbar with blog pages. Having the pages in the very top of your blog will give it a more “corporate” look.

To list your pages, use wp_list_pages WP function.

You can find a brief explaination about it in Customizing WordPress header or in the official docs.

Logo

Now that I have a logo, it’s time to use it…

Categories

Then I wanted to display categories in the header, and I used Multi Column Category List Plugin for WordPress to split them into three columns.

I also modified a bit the plugin to show how many posts have been written for each category.

Gallery

The last thing I added was a slideshow showing my latest projects. I used SlideShowPro that isn’t free but has a lot of features and is made with Flash, that means no frameworks/complex javascripts required.

It’s also fully XML driven, that means it’s easy to configure.

If you are looking for a good free alternative, check JonDesign’s SmoothGallery, that uses MooTools.

And this is the result…

… an header that’s not the “image-title-description” you are used to see in WP themes.

During the next days I will redesign the rest of the blog, to make its contents as much accessible as I can.

One of the top 50,000 sites in the world

Well, everybody knows it’s not right, but sounds fine.

As I said in the post New look for www.emanueleferonato.com, I am on top 50,000 sites according to Alexa.

It’s not so bad for a niche blog, so let’s go to the pub and have a drink, tell the bartender I will go there and pay tomorrow.

New look for www.emanueleferonato.com

The blog is approaching Alexa’s top 50,000 (and I like to think it’s one of the most 50,000 visited sites in the world) so I spent the weekend to redesign it.

After browsing a thousand of templates, both free and not free, I decided to download Silhouette WordPress Theme and take a look at Macalicious and changing a lot of things and this is the result.

It’s far from being finished but I wanted a feedback from users.

With the new look I want to focus the blog on contents. I removed Adsense injections because I want posts to be ads free for a better reading.

I also have some other stuff to add on the blog but after two days of hacking, coding, deleting, installing again, hacking, coding and so on I am really tired :) Read more

Looking for your experience for a case history

I need some of your experiences in order to build a case history section in this blog and for an article do be published on a paper magazine… and maybe for something else.

If you think this blog changed your way of developing and monetizing Flash games, or just made you love Flash game developing, then please leave a comment with your first name, the first letter of your last name and the Country you are from (example: Emanuele F. – Italy)

And, of course, your experience.

Thank you very much.

2 years of blogging

Today the blog is 2 years old!!

A lot of funny things happened during this year… Google slapped me down from PR7 to PR4, then the site was hacked a dozen times and marked by Google as an harmful site.

Now, it’s PR5, recognized as an authority by Google and I am the most famous Emanuele in the world!

The number of posts raised from 77 to 264, the number of comments from 1,093 to 4862

Alexa rank went from 158,059 to 65,147, and the blog had over 1,000,000 visitors

What an amazing year!

Well, next one will be better!! I have so many plans…

Blog in peace

Do you think blogging is a safe job/passion?

You’re wrong!

A New York Times article show us blogging is dangerous.

If you read the article, you will know Russell Shaw died some days ago of a heart attack… Marc Orchant died in december of a massive coronary, while in the same month Om Malik survived an heart attack.

Even if you are still alive and kicking, remember that bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I dont’ want to say anything more at the moment, but I would like you to read the article and tell what do you think about.

Closing the blog

I am very unhappy to inform you I must close the blog.

As you may know, casual gaming is a growing and growing industry, maybe bigger than triple-A gaming industry.

I received a letter from a lawyer representing one of the biggest software house in the world saying that Tileball and its clones generated from this tutorial have the same concept of a next-to-be-released triple-A title.

The same lawyer said I am guilty of stealing ideas from their project… and just because one of the employees of the software house is an active user of this blog.

I replied Tileball was a flop, and almost nobody knows it, but they said I am responsible of the many clones being played around the web now.

The only chance I have, if I don’t want to pay a seven figure fee, is to close the blog.

I want you to know that writing tutorials for you all was one of the best experiences in my life, and maybe we’ll see again in some other way.

It’s very sad that billionaire companies act this way, but that’s how world goes.

See you

Emanuele

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