… and not much gets done. Not on the games programming front anyway.

I’ve been incredibly busy with my job. I had to finish an important project, before I leave after next week. Yes yes, only 1 week to go! Last week I was in Paris (Versailles to be exact) to integrate my last project with the client’s system. It was hard work, coding every day and then some more in the evenings at my hotel room. But at the end the client seemed happy, so I left with a good feeling!

As a result, I was not able to do any blogging at all. But this will improve massively the coming month! As my journey as an online entrepreneur and game producer begins, I expect I’ll have lots of experiences to write about

A while ago, I discovered the Earner’s Forum, an very popular forum with a massive amount of information for people who want ot make, or are currently making, money online. An interesting place to hang out… It pointed me to an interesting interview with Patrick Gavin, president of Text Link Ads, the system I use to monetize this blog.

Anyway, more stuff coming up the following days, including the Speeltijd website stats for September, and some stories about 10 years of Bubblomania, including sales stats!

Another Text-Link-Ads sponsor appeared on my blog: Get Latest Game News & Review. The site, called SyncGaming, features game news, reviews and previews, and has a community forum.

This is my third sponsor already, and it brings my Text Link Ads revenue for september to more than $33! So this seems to be a better than expected extra revenue source, which will come in very handy when I will be a full time indie, in a month!

The months before my first product release will be very tough, with zero income. So, if you want to help me out, you can do so by becoming a sponsor too! You will not only get a link under the Sponsors header on the left, but also a permanent link and a little site description in this blog!

How to become a sponsor?

1. Sign up with Text Link Ads, if you haven’t done so already.
2. Once successfully signed up, search for my blog, by typing “Dark Moon Blog” in the search box, or go directly to my blog details.
3. Click the Add To Cart button.
4. Enter the necessary info to buy the link. A link will cost $25 per month. If you’re new to Text Link Ads, they will give you $100 for free to spend on ads! So it’s a great opportunity either way.

This blog is slowly growing, and will continue doing so when I’m independent, and have more time available to post. So it’s a good investment!

Alternatively, if you own a mac, you can also sponsor me by buying my game Bubblomania X, for only $9.95.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on 2 websites: one for my mother and one for my girlfriend. It was also quite busy at my day job, so as a consequence, I hardly made any progress with the Smiley Puzzle Project…

My mother’s website is meant for her small business: she’s running a one-person beauty-parlour. This website can be visited at www.vivianetilley.be. It’s still under development: a lot of content should still be added. The look & feel of the site should be more or less final. The background is actually a scan of a painting my mother made! She’s very creative, the curtains you can see on the picture are also hand-made by her. In the future we might use this site to sell some of her work.

The other site is my girlfriend’s blog: Speeltijd. I’ve set up a WordPress blog for her, and she’s going to provide the content. For her job, she’s working a lot with kids aged between 4 and 12, and she has collected a large number of child game ideas to entertain these kids. These are not computer games, but games that can be played outside with a group of kids, or at parties. This site is thus meant both for children and people taking care of children or organising parties for children.

She’s just starting out with this site, but over time it should collect quite some useful content. And we hope it will also attract quite some visitors, as one of the long-term goals is to monetize this site. The content will always remain free of course.

Both sites are in dutch, so they’re meant for a local audience. They are also both located on my webspace with Canaca, since I have a huge amount of webspace and bandwidth there. More than enough to host a dozen more sites if I want to! It’s cheaper to just buy a domain name and a forwarding DNS entry, than to buy new hosting for each site. And this way I can experiment with some ideas…

My ultimate indie dream is of course to have a number of websites providing a basic stream of passive income for me, so I can work almost full time on designing and developing games!

As you may have noticed, I’ve updated the look of this blog a bit. I have added the images at the top, which link to the corresponding categories of this blog, and the author description on the left side.

But another maybe surprising change, is that I have removed the Google Adsense ads! They were here for almost 3 months, and they haven’t made me a single cent. The main reason is that the ads did not really correspond with the contents of this blog. And as a consequence, nobody clicked on them.

I was considering to remove them for a while now, but I finally did it after reading this post on Entrepreneur’s Journey (which is a really great blog on internet marketing and online revenue btw).

It made me think again about the purpose of this blog, and I came up with the following:

• A marketing vehicle for my games and my music.
• A place with extra information for people playing my games, like the Bubblomania tips and tricks.
• A place to write about my creative projects and experiments as a beginning indie game producer and online entrepreneur, like the Smiley Puzzle Project.
• A place that might contain useful information for other game producers, online entrepreneurs, fans and freaks…

Cluttering the place with ads leading away from my site, obviously doesn’t fit this purpose. The only reason for having these ads was to help fund my web hosting expenses, but it clearly failed that goal. Maybe some day, when I have loads of visitors, I will probably add some form of advertising again. But for the moment there’s no point in doing so.

I’m still in doubt about the advertising on my main games site, so any comments on the subject are welcome!

I have added my latest Moonspider song, “Another Plane Of Existence (140bpm Refined Mix”, as background music to this blog. It’s an up-tempo melodic trance song, a refined remix of one of my first trance tracks. You are invited to leave your opinion about the song as a comment to this post!

You can also visit Moonspider’s music page, still heavily under development, to check out my other songs. I have added an easy playback function next to each song. All my tracks are made with Propellerheads Reason, a great piece of software!

It has been way to long since my last update to this blog. And the reason is very simple: last week I bought myself a brand new shiny iMac, with an Intel Core Duo processor!

And of course I’ve been spending way too much time installing and setting it up, and playing with all the new features of MacOS X 10.4. Yes, I was still using 10.3 on my almost 4 years old Powerbook G4…

The difference in speed is amazing. My favourite Java development environment IntelliJ IDEA is working like a charm now.

But, I have to be honest and say that there are a few negative sides also… I’ve experienced quite some crashes from various applications, and even my own game Enigmatic Movements quits with an error message. Seems like I have some investigation to do…

But I expect things to get better as more apps get compiled into universal binaries. The nice thing is that my machine will continue to feel faster as more and more software is optimized!

I just updated my blog to WordPress, and at the same time moved it to www.darkmoonsw.com/blog. I must say that it is a major improvement over the older b2 blog I was using! And I was able to copy all the posts of the original blog, so nothing is lost.

I still have to customize it a bit, and get the adsense in etc. But that’s a job for tomorrow, I should’ve been in bed by now!

After reading Steve Pavlina’s article about Adsense revenue, I decided to add Google Adsense advertisements to this blog. These are the ads you can see on the left of this page. I tried to make them as non-intrusive as possible, since I’m not really fond of big flashing banners.

A few months ago, I already added adsense to my shareware games site. Up till now, it made me about 10$. So it’s a start…
If you’re interested in adding adsense to your own site, you can click on the Google Adsense button on the left, halfway down this page!

I realize this blog still has very little content, and as a consequence, very low traffic. But I plan to grow these, and it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment. My hope is to eventually be able to pay my web hosting with it! My current host is Canaca, and I’m rather happy with them. Their cheapest offer is 3.95$ per month, for 20GB of web space and 500GB monthly bandwidth! So it’s ideal for hosting shareware and music!