It seems like Google has done another round of pagerank updates. My www.bubblomania.com domain has received a PR of 3, coming from 0. Also the Alexa rank of that site has improved: currently at 981,176 (with a 1 week average of 323,024).

Our www.speeltijd.net site also received a PR of 3, coming from 2. The Alexa rank has changed to 2,063,153, coming from over 4,000,000 previously (with a 1 week average of 575,064).

This site, www.darkmoonsw.com, is still at PR 4, with an Alexa rank of 637,113 (slight improvement).

This is a very good evolution of these sites, which I hope will help in raising their advertising potential. I didn’t expect that the change in Google PR would have such a big effect on Alexa rank, but I’m not complaining!

Finally! I received the papers today, I’m officially independent! My one-man business is registered, and I have a Belgian VAT number now: BTW-BE-0886.671.654.

So, this means I can start making expenses! But of course, the idea is to also have some income. I’m hard at work to achieve that!

Unfortunately, having a company also means extra paperwork, which is not something I particularly enjoy. But in my case, it shouldn’t be much of a hassle. And there are still accountants

It’s been a while since my last blog post… I’ve been sick for a couple of days (which is not good when you don’t get paid!), and working hard on the other days.

So, what have I been up to recently? I’ve been doing the (mostly digital) paperwork to become officially independent. So I’ll soon have my own company, which is the Belgian equivalent of a US sole proprietorship company (i think). And I also spoke to an accountant about a couple of issues. The internet business thing is still relatively new, and even for an accountant it’s not always clear

Game production-wise, I’m working on 2 prototypes for new games. One of them, codenamed Smiley Memory, will be part of the Smiley Puzzle Project. It’s based on the classic Memory game, in this case matching smileys, with some action added. I designed it together with my girlfriend, and she’s helping with the level design!

The other one is a very early prototype of a secret action game, codenamed Quantum Chaser. The thing’s gotta have a name, right?

Recently we added a phpBB forum to our Speeltijd website, to start a community where people can discuss the articles posted on the site.

The website itself is a WordPress blog, and I wanted to do some integration between the blog and the forum. When making a blog post, I want a forum thread to be created automatically, where the blog post can be discussed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any plugin which does this.

So, I devised my own solution I found some PHP code by netclectic on the phpBB forum, that allows you to insert a post in your forum with a single funtion call. The code can be downloaded here. Then I started to write a WordPress plugin to call this code when a blog post is published.

This, of course, was the tricky part… It turned out that it’s not possible to call phpBB code from WordPress code, because both have several functions with the same name. This resulted in PHP errors about function redeclarations!

So I did the following: I wrote some PHP code that uses this insert post function to create a thread in the forum, for a blog post with a given title and URL, passed as GET parameters. And then I wrote a very simple WordPress plugin that calls this PHP script through a socket, with the blog post’s title and link. This solution turns out to work very nicely!

The code for this is currently very specific for my situation, that’s why I don’t make it available yet. But if I can find the time, and there’s enough interest, I will publish a decent customizable solution here!

It’s been very quiet around the Smiley Puzzle Project on this blog. So it’s time for a sneak peek at my current plans, which I hope to realise during this year. Quite a while ago, I registered 2 domains to be used for this project: www.SmileyPuzzleGames.com and www.SmileyPuzzle.com.

The first one is intended to become a small online games arcade, with multiple puzzle games, all featuring 3D animated smileys. I have several ideas for puzzle games, for which I will first make a webgame version. The most popular games will get a deluxe downloadable version. Today I made a logo which should give a first impression of the concept. A larger version can be seen at the Smiley Puzzle Games website itself.

The second domain, just named Smiley Puzzle, is a short and nice sounding name that currently forwards to the Smiley Puzzle Project category on this blog. But it will be the main site for the first downloadable Smiley Puzzle game.

Why create puzzle games with smileys? Well, the obvious reason is that I like both smileys and puzzle games! The smiley is one of the icons of the internet age, and the cool 3D looking ones are very popular with kids (thank you, MSN). So it is my hope that smiley themed games will attract people.

My goal is to make mentally challenging puzzle games, not the mind-numbing variant. But they also have to be accessible to a large demographic, and kids in particular. The games should be easy to learn and play, and entertaining enough that it’s not seen as a heavy mental activity. At the same time, using your brain will be rewarded and necessary when progressing in the game. This, of course, is easier said then done…

A new year has started, so, Happy New Year to all my readers!

For me, this will be the year to take things seriously, and to make my business work! It will be tough, but I hope to come out at the end of 2007 with a lot more assets, and a lot more knowledge! And preferably with a couple of extra income streams

As per usual, I’ll give a quick rundown of my website stats for the past month, starting with the Speeltijd site.

As you can see on the Google Analytics chart, the site had 5409 visitors, which is down 10% from last month. As a result, Adsense revenue also dropped about 16%. This little dip was to be expected, because of the Christmas holidays, and the school exams period before. We expect traffic to pick up again, and increase when we launch the forum this month.

Traffic for this blog and the Dark Moon Software site also decreased a bit, again caused by the holidays, and a lower blog update frequency. Both traffic and blog posts will increase again, when I’ll be writing about my indie business plans for the coming year. I’ll be doing some experiments with my Bubblomania webgame, and start again with the Smiley Puzzle Project.

This blog also had a new sponsor through Text Link Ads this month, bringing it’s revenue for december to over $50! A nice way to pay for hosting All 5 sponsors will continue sponsoring next month, so I want to thank them all again: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s, MaraPets Games and Be The Dealer!

I also added the Performancing Partners program to this blog last month, through which you can advertise here for only $20 a month! You’ll get the same deal as when buying a text link ad: a small review of your site on this blog! This means you’ll get a permanent link on a this PR4 site for free! The same applies when you buy a Performancing ad on our dutch Speeltijd site.

Have a great year!