Adam Searle » Blog

Well, 2 weeks late but I think I’ve finally settled on the ‘year of’ for 2008. The year of overhaul, across many aspects of life. Work, social, health, travel - yes, finally, I actually do plan on going overseas last year, after putting it off for ages..With the year of this year, I’m also setting 5 brief goals. Things I want to have done or reached by the end of the year. I didn’t really do this in the previous year of’s (risk, then soul), so consider it an enhancement to an otherwise personally successful formula:

1.  Finish up my research/study, and feel I have a solid and proven grasp on object orientated thinking and actionscript 3 .0 (ie overhauling work/career)
2. Travel! My cousin in the UK is getting married, and the timing ties in well with Flash on the Beach. So I’d like to head over for a couple of months and do a contiki tour or other around Europe for while. I want to travel to california more but things fall into place much better with europe at this time
3. Continuing my health focus. Coming up on one year now (late feb), and it has been great. I can feel the difference
4. By the end of the year, end up in a solid work position. Yep, it looks like Adam is finally going to cash in the freelancer lifestyle and take a full time job. By the end of the year, something solid to start 09 off well with. Finally an mx5 for summer too perhaps…
5. Meet new people, social progression. The overseas trip should be great for that. A bit of that university feeling of getting out of ones shell too

So that about sums it up. End of the year I’ll look back on this and see how things went, for the overhaul of 2008. Feeling good about it! Dont count on more regular blog posts though ;) 

Long time no post! A lot has happened in a short period of time..

I’ve got two new works online, both are up now in the Work section of this site. The first is the Cofa Annual 2007, which marks my third year on the project. Like previous years the mission was to take submissions from all graduating students at UNSW, Cofa, and compile them together on a cd/dvd in a promo/portfolio piece that the uni can then distribute out to galleries, agencies, schools.. and also show prospective students. The final result is an interactive experience, browsing for students by name and discipline, showing a range of still and video works. My involvement is always as flash developer and tech guy. 2005 marked the first iteration, in which we had the design genius of my mate Johnny Le and a few other also graduating students. In 2006 I returned, now no longer a student, and working with a new student group.

This year for the 2007 Annual we decided to take it in a different direction - a DVD as well a website. My mate Stephen Mok headed up the website side and I took the familiar DVD route. All in all I’d say this year I think we have the most impressive offering so far. I really love how the DVD turned out; its fast fluid and juicy. The website is a great addition too, being more web-friendly than the DVD would be online, and is a nice solution in itself. All in all cofa marketing should be pretty happy

The dvd yours truly made (online for the fun of it, visit Cofa if you want a real copy): http://annual.cofa.unsw.edu.au/2007/dvd
The website that just went live: http://annual.cofa.unsw.edu.au/2007

The second project is a rehash of an older thing. One of the early games I made with Jason at Subversive Games was ‘Scumbag’, a political mud-slinging game. For the Australian 2007 elections we reskinned it with the two main political leaders, John Howard and Kevin Rudd, putting them in a fun political toy. The big news is we partnered with Sydney Morning Herald and had it as a permanent part of their Election 07 page - we even made the front page of the newspapers website a few times! Good times indeed. Anyhow, check out the updated ‘Scumbag 07′!

On a related note, Scumbag 07 was the first time I’ve used MochiAds; made by the same guys who provide the awesome MochiBot that virtually everything I put online makes use of. It was an interesting first try. Ads inside the actual flash swf are cool, and mean even if your swf goes viral and spreads everywhere, you’ll still gain from the plays. The range of advertising is currently quite limited, and I think the returns on Google adsense have been a lot better, but I’m hopeful that MochiAds will continue to improve. Would have been great to use something like MochiAds back when we put Ninjaman up..

After all that was done and up, I made an escape over to Perth to see the Red Bull Air Race. It was a fantastic show - some of those pilots were doing up to 10g’s! In fact the helicopter that filmed the show from the air was probably the most impressive - you dont notice it on tv, but what that pilot had to do to keep up with the planes was simply amazing. He also demonstrated the course before the planes took stage, by racing through it in his helicopter, including going inverted! You have not seen ‘wow!!!’ until you see a helicopter rolling over inverted haha!

Back rested, I’m diving into Actionscript 3 finally. Not having a formal OO-based education it means picking up on a lot of new ideas. Challenging at times but very interesting. I’m going through Colin Moock’s Essential Actionscript 3 book. When I started I really thought it was the bees knees, but I’m starting to wonder if he’s such a good writer after all - his wording just isnt as concise, logical or user friendly as it could be. Still, his technical knowledge is awe-inspiring, and he is a great source of utterly indepth, drown-yourself-in-code knowledge. After this I have more object orientated related material to get through, and then a few ‘play’ projects waiting in the wings over summer. It’s great to have time away from work to be able to do all this!

I was asked recently what the latest stats were on Ninjaman, and had to respond that honestly we haven’t checked in a long time. Thought it would be a fun thing to do! The game continues to receive a fairly steady flow of plays - the hype dropoff is long over, and if anything recently the number of plays has been increasing.

Here’s the summary since we launched it:
-Ninjaman plays: 24.36 million plays
-Samurai sam plays: 10 million recorded at Miniclip.com until their tracking system went down (long time ago). We estimate a further 10 million plays
-Ninjaman has been recorded to have virally spread to 4353 websites. Hot damn!

I’ve always been thrilled with the success we received with Ninjaman online, but at least now I can update the ‘how many plays figure’ to 34 million known, 44 million estimated! I must thank MochiBot for providing a tremendous flash tracking system for this, that we picked up from day 1.

Makes me wonder what it would have been like had we launched with MochiAds (if that was available back in Jan 2006) - which inserts ads into the preloading phase of the game, similar to AdSense. It’s too late to integrate that into the game now and reach many of the websites that are hosting the game, as the viral distribution to web hosts is largely over (or at last we think).

I always enjoyed the work we did on Ninjaman, and have been proud of how its done and the reception it gets when I show it around. I think it largely eclipses the work I’ve been doing since then (freelance web dev contracting and some other gaming stuff), on several points: the sheer audience it received, my enjoyment in making it, perfectionism in what we strove for, and the non-commercial drive behind it. Not to say that I haven’t enjoyed what I’ve done since; not at all; but its seeing stats like this and remembering back to then that really motivates me to do another fun online game, that isn’t so commercially driven as my recent work.

It is, after all, the year of soul!

I just received a call from a nice Telstra rep ‘informing’ me that because my home line is provided by Optus Cable (along with broadband), we can only use that line for Optus ADSL2 products, and miss out on Telstras ADSL2 offerings.

Cry me a river.

The offer was to “upgrade” me to a Telstra landline, which would open up the door to Telstra ADSL products now that my area has been ADSL2 enabled. Incidentally this would open the door to far better value-for-money providers than Telstra for ADSL2 products, but I guess that wasn’t on his script to tell me.

I have a long memory of the broadband struggle this country has endured because of Telstra. I remember seeing a preview of Telstra cable before its retail launch, and yes being amazed at the speed. The offer then was $95/month for 100mb. I remember thinking if only I had that.. Fastforward to the launch of a rival in the broadband space with Optus in 2000 and things became great. Optus embraced a system called “netstat” which calculated the average users download usage (netstat 1.0), and allowed you to do 10 times that (netstat 10.0 - beyond this you were given the boot). The beauty of this system was that as our collective usage online grew, the average usage grew, and hence our ‘download limit’ grew. It was a system of beauty. At the time, this enabled ~20gb/month of transfer. Around the same time, broadband ‘pioneer’ Telstra slapped their users with a 3gb cap. Great value for money.

When Telstra introduced ADSL on their landlines, they finally enabled wide broadband competition. Except with a handicap, in that the line fees ISPs had to pay telstra were so exhorbant other ISPs had to sell plans at a loss in order to compete with offerings from ‘Telstra retail’. When Telstra introduced a $30 ADSL plan with a microscopic data allowance (and insane excess fees), other providers couldn’t even get a line for that price, let alone their own costs added to that.

Really, they have not changed. Telstra recently proposed a FTTN (fibre to the node) plan which would involve Telstra laying fibre between its exchanges, and offering a product roughly similar to ADSL2 (over copper lines, anyhow) to the end user. Catch was, they would only implement it if no one else could use their lines. This highlights Australias number one challenge with broadband - we cannot have Telstra holding both the infrastructure card AND selling a retail product while answering to shareholders. There is no win win in this situation. Either Telstra wholesale charge a fortune to other ISPs for line access, driving up the value of Telstra retails plans and hence delivering a better earnings report for investors, or Telstra wholesale does a good thing for the country and makes the broadband space more competitive, most likely driving down sales at Telstra retail, and hence disappointing investors. The two simply dont work together.

The government needs to split Telstra in half - one side that can answer to shareholders with retail products, and the other that can push our countrys’ broadband infrastructure forward. Sell off the retail side as an independant company and watch it sink when it has to pay full rates for line access. We are so far behind in the broadband race globally its a sham, perpetuated by none other than Telstra. If we get a new government, I really hope they do something about this. Something has to untie the infrastructure lock and start investing in it, so that we can start moving forward.

Club Penguin, the wildly popular kids-orientated virtual community recently sold to Disney for a whopping US$350 million. What a success story for virtual communities!

A bit of background. A little while back I did some research into club penguin for my work at Subversive Games. It is what is known as a virtual community - a place people go to, create an account, and walk around and play games with other users. The game is entirely penguin themed, complete with their little waddle as they move across the snow. Club Penguin is free to join and play in, however they sell upgraded accounts that let you do more in the world (you wear special clothes that identifies you as a paying member too) for a small monthly fee. I personally know a couple of kids who are into the world of club Penguin, and its pretty big with them.

Why is this all interesting? Well, people have being saying that virtual communities will be the ‘next big thing’, the sort of next step from mass multiplayer online games (MMO’s) - your warcrafts, etc. Virtual communities really take the facebook/myspace world and meld it into an interactive, walk-around-with-my-avatar experience. The community is huge too - 700,000 users. I have a feeling that a few years from now, rather than being contracted to design websites and games for the web, we’ll be looking at media portals and games for existence *inside* the virtual community programs.

Club Penguin is particularly interesting to me for two reasons. One, its front end is built in flash. For flash it’s pretty ‘big’ in terms of users and technically what it provides. Being made in flash, it runs in the browser, which means no extra programs have to be installed - great for kids, and for logging in anywhere you go. Also means its platform agnostic; being a mac advocate, I hate being cut out of the loop with windows only products. Secondly, its built on the backend Smartfox server, which is something I happen to be researching soon. Smartfox provides all the heavy lifting with a multiuser framework. Looking forward to getting into that down the track.

Just a few little things to get through first…

In the latest edition of the CoFA Magazine there is a half page write up of me. Having only graduated a year and a half ago, it puts things into perspective. I’m still very much involved around my old campus - teaching in multimedia, and working on the CoFA Annual project as their advisor/technical director. I still feel like a part of me belongs there.

Thanks to Naomi for the write up! To share with everyone, I scanned the article.. hit the thumbnail below to see in its full glory.

All three are free and relatively easy to set up, and will help you bring in and track traffic to your site.

1. Google Analytics
Analytics is a free monitoring tool for your website, tracking the what-where-when of viewers coming to your site. Hits are recorded in terms of unique viewers, returning viewers, how many times certain pages are viewed, and how long users spend on your site. The geographical report graphically shows where your viewers are in the world. Entry points are monitored, both in terms of the page people arrive at, and how they arrived at your site - directly or from referring websites. Search engine statistics tell you what keywords people are using to find you and from which search engine.

For example, I know that in the last month I’ve had 572 visits, 77 of which were from the US and 64 from Australia. The average viewer spend 5 minutes on my site, and 90% of them were first time viewers. 27% came from a referral site, the most popular of which was Ninjaman. 12% came from search engines - the most common search being ‘adam searle’ - with Google being the most useful to me. Very useful software.

If like me your website or blog is based on Wordpress, try the Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress.

2. Google Sitemaps
Sitemaps is a tool designed to aide google and other search engines in the navigation and indexing of your site. Using the tools provided on their site, you generate a sitemap.xml file that is then placed on the root level of your site. Search engines (other than google too) find this file and then have a better idea of all. You can read more about the theory behind sitemaps here. Additionally the Google Sitemap interface gives an insight into Googles record of you, and which sites link to you. The PageRank system that google is based on favours other, preferably reputable sites linking you - so this is useful in building relationships with key partners.

There is an excellent plugin for Wordpress that generates a Google Sitemap file, puts it in the right place, and notifies Google that you have updated your sitemap. Check out Google Sitemap Generator.

3. Google Adsense
Adsense is Googles advertising platform, enabling you to easily add a revenue source to your site. While I dont use this here, over at ninja-man.com we generate a healthy revenue stream that covers bandwidth costs etc involved in hosting the game. You’ll want to be bringing in at least a thousand views a month in order to make it worthwhile hitting your users with ads.

Check those out, and happy blogging!

I am excited to say - welcome to the new-look site! adamsearle.com is running on the latest and greatest version of Wordpress, and using the fantastic theme “iTheme” by N.Design. Goes brilliantly with my Apple evangelism!

Additionally, I’ve overhauled all the content here. The About, Work and Contact pages have been rewritten and actually serve a purpose now! As you can see I’ve also added a Ninjaman section - in which I finally have written a semi-brief ’story of Ninjaman’. A great trip down memory lane, and perhaps interesting to anyone out there reading this blog.

Enjoy the new content, and love the look and feel!