MochiBot Blog

We made a minor build today to address some issues with MochiBot not working with Flash 5 SWFs. MochiBot will now work for SWFs published in Flash 5 so for those of you who were waiting for this fix please try it out and let us know how it works out.

A special thanks goes out to Jack Smack for helping us to test this out.

Highlighting great content that harness the power of MochiBot.

UltraBlock is a game that was developed by WDDG for Corn Nuts several years ago. The game was brought back to life when MochiBot was added to the SWF and released to a couple portal sites. Now the game is hosted and played on over 40+ websites daily. The SWF has been added to our demo to show how wide spread a popular game can get and the power that MochiBot has in capturing this information.

Subdisc has been relaunched with a sexy new look that integrates beautiful designs with some amazing Flash video reels. The work of Marucs Ericsson is nothing less than spectacular. Don’t forget to check out his demo reel.

Endless Flight 2 is an entertaining game that sets you as a dragon travelling through winding caves as you fly for your life trying to avoid the oncoming obstacles.

We’ve temporarily removed the Unique Visitor stats from the site because the calculations for that data was causing undue stress on the system. Don’t worry, none of your data will be lost. It just won’t be visible while we work on a solution to speed up the Unique Visitor calculations.

Thanks for your patience while we work on improving the site.

This week’s showcase highlights a couple of our international users that have been drumming up quite a bit of traffic for themselves. We never imagined that we would have users in Asian countries, but we’ve had a tremendous amount of users sign up from China, Taiwan, and Japan. It’s a good thing MochiBot supports unicode characters.

busifan - This Flash animation has been generating a lot of views and spreading to quite a few Chinese Flash portals.

Mushroom Kingdom - This is a really clever site that brings back such great memories of me and my old school Nintendo. Flash is used throughout the site and the Mush Master is using MochiBot to see what sections of his site are the most popular. Go to the MushBank and run a search on “mochi”. hehe

Find Frank a Job - WDDG built this promotional site with Perich + Partners for Kelly Services. WDDG used MochiBot in the site’s Flash content to provide their client with a better understanding of the effectiveness of their ad campaign.

It’s about 1:45am and we just finished pushing out a new build. Yipee! Bob and I were working a little slow today because we went kite boarding for the first time ever yesterday. Not only are we both sore from being dragged around the ocean by a kite for four hours, but we’re also both sporting a toasty shade of red from sunburn. But enough with the pleasantries; let’s see what we have in store with this build.

• New - We added the three most recent blog entries to the Dashboard just to keep everyone up to date on news and system status.
• New - You can now subscribe and share hourly stats of your SWFs with the new Atom 1.0 RSS feed located at the bottom of your Dashboard.
• New - Tell the world that you’re using MochiBot with logos that you can add to your SWFs (logo 1, logo 2)
• Improved - We got rid of the popularity ranks for each blog entry because that just seemed to confuse people more than necessary.
• Improved - The Host Report interface has been tweaked a bit to improve usability. There’s a neat little loading animation next to each URL when expanding the URL list. Local views have also been added back to the site so that you can see how many people download your SWFs and play them directly on their computers. This has been a popular feature for the Flash game developers.

Now I’m going to soak in some ice water to stop the burn and hopefully get some sleep tonight.

We fixed up the MySQL issue we ran into and will be working on a new solution to deal with the inconsistencies of MySQL. You’ll probably notice a break in the number of views your received during the outage. Sorry for any inconveniences. We’re working hard to avoid these types of mishaps again.

We just found out that one of our databases was full and hasn’t been storing any traffic data for the past couple hours. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we’re working on a fix right now. I’ll post another entry when the system is back up.

A lot of great companies and designers have begun using MochiBot and this is the first of many weekly blog postings where we’ll be showcasing their work. Some of these Flash games and animations caught our attention as they showed up in our traffic reports as some of the most heavily trafficked Flash content. Others were just works that we enjoyed and felt were worth sharing.

We hope you enjoy these as much as we did!

• SlideShowPro - Todd Dominey, the creator of SlideShowPro, is using MochiBot in his product demo.
• Miniclip.com - The game designers at Miniclip are using MochiBot in their new game, Sudoku (caution: this game is highly addictive).
• Albino Blacksheep - Steven Lerner, the creator of AlbinoBlacksheep.com, has used MochiBot in his Flash animation and is also encouraging his community of developers to use MochiBot to get better usage reports and help combat Flash Pirates.

If you would like to have your Flash work showcased, then just send an email to info@mochibot.com with the URL of your Flash content and your MochiBot username.

It’s been a couple weeks since our last build, but the wait has been worthwhile because we’ve added some exciting new features. Here’s what you can look forward to the next time you log in:

• New - The Dashboard is now fully equipped with graphing capabilities for up to 6 SWFs. Not only that, but we also used the Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit to make it Flashtastic!
• New - After many requests … the “remember me” functionality has been turned on in the Login page so now you don’t have to type in your email and password every time you come to the site.
• Improved - The Traffic Report graph now changes to match the reporting days that have been selected.
• Improved - Overall site performance has been improved to things up a bit. You’ll notice further speed improvements over the next few weeks as we continue to tune the site.
• Improved - We got permission from Jon Rosenberg, the creator of goats.com, to use his pirate monkey image. He was even kind enough to give us a new image just for our site. Many thanks Jon!
• Improved - We’re using FeedBurner now to better manage our blog RSS feed.

You’ll also notice that the Host report no longer shows how many “local” views your SWF received. This is only temporary as we’re tuning that report for better performance. You can expect to see the local view tracking functionality turned back on by next week.

Until then, have fun and enjoy using MochiBot. Don’t be shy about leaving us comments and feedback. We’ve been getting some great feature requests so keep them coming and send them to feedback@mochibot.com. We’ll mention your name if you submit a feature that we build and release.

Last week was both hectic and exciting for us with the launch of MochiKit, Bob’s birthday (woohoo!), and a new high profile site using MochiBot.

MochiKit is the JavaScript library that we use in MochiBot.com to handle all of the client side table sorting and data manipulation. Here’s a tear jerking blog entry that someone wrote about MochiKit [argv0.net]. If you’re interested in keeping up with MochiKit news and conversations then you’re welcome to join the mailing list.

As for MochiBot we’ve been very happy to see people using it and providing us with such great feedback. It was surprising last week when we noticed that our traffic numbers took a big jump up. After some investigation we found out that the people from Minilip.com (one of the most popular online gaming sites on the web) were using MochiBot to track some of their games. The guys there have been great about giving us constructive feedback on new features they’d like too see. If there’s something that you want to see added to MochiBot, then just let us know here or in our forum.

Speaking of new features, we’re back on track this week with building out more MochiBot features so you’ll be seeing some new goodies soon.