MochiBot Blog

One of the most commonly requested features from our users is event tracking.  Everyone has a different goal in mind when it comes to tracking the various events that can happen within a Flash movie.  Therefore, I’ll go over some simple techniques that you can use to get better information out of MochiBot. 

You can track events within your Flash movie by simply creating a new MochiBot for each event.  Multiple MochiBots can be used in a SWF so all you have to do is place some MochiBot code on your timeline at the point where you want to track an event.  Here are some different scenarios of how this technique can be used.

Game Developers:  Game developers usually want to track what levels people reach and thus determine how hard their game is.  To begin tracking level progression with MochiBot you should create a new MochiBot for each level in your game.  It will help to organize your Dashboard if you name your MochiBots with the name of the game first and then the level after that.  For example, a game named Gopher with three levels could have the following MochiBots:

• Gopher: Level 1 (placed at the begining of Level 1)
• Gopher: Level 2 (placed at the begining of Level 2)
• Gopher: Level 3 (placed at the begining of Level 3)

Place the MochiBot code on the timeline where each level begins and you now have a level progression monitor.  

Flash Site Developers:  Web traffic monitors are great for seeing how much traffic you get to your site, but they just can’t track actions of your visitors if you have a site that’s built in Flash.  Therefore, you’ll want to use MochiBot in each of the various sections of your Flash site to see what “pages” your visitors are going to.  You may also want to track click events on a link so all you would have to do is to create a MochiBot to track that event and place the code in your button movieclip.

We’ve even seen people use MochiBot in a 1×1pixel SWF on each of the HTML pages in their site to see which pages are most popular.  We thought it was so clever that we did on our site too.  :)

Flash Videos and Cartoons:  People who publish videos or create animations in Flash need to know not only how many people are watching their work, but also how much of the work people are watching.  Do people watch the whole movie, 10 seconds of the movie or get half way through and leave?  One way you can monitor how much of your Flash movie people watch is to place some MochiBot code in different points of your timeline.  A simple and effective practice is to track every quarter of your movie.  For example, if you have a Flash video or animation that has 1000 frames, then you’ll want to put some MochiBot code at frames 250, 500, 750, and 1000.  

After reading all of this you may wonder why we just don’t build an additional event tracking system in MochiBot.  Well we’re working on it, but the biggest challenge that we have to overcome is finding a simple yet effective way to present the data so that all of the different types of people who use MochiBot can get the information they need.  It’s amazing how much little changes to the interface design can make a big difference in usability.  With that said we’re working to give you all the best possible experience while using our product.

Good luck with your Flash endeavors and we hope to hear some stories from you guys on how you’re using MochiBot.

Our friends at Stimunation have recently released a new game on Miniclip.com called Monster Trucks. It’s a beautifully designed game with photorealistic backgrounds and a great 2D feel. The goal of the game is to finish each level within the time limit while trying not to blow your truck up doing flips and smashing other cars. The physics of the game are great and takes me back to those days when I used to launch Matchbox cars off my school books.

This game is so popular that it’s topping our charts right now. Wow!

Yes, it’s another build. There are some bug fixes in this build, but more importantly we wanted to see how well our new Shared Stats feature would work. A lot of users have been asking us for a way to share their MochiBot stats with other people without having to give out any account information so we put the Shared Stats feature together to satisfy this need. Here are some details about this build:

• Shared Stats - You can now create unique access URLs to share with different people. Each URL will have a log of its own to tell you how many times it was used, when it was last accessed, and by what IP address. It’s a great feature to share with clients or to just brag about how popular your Flash is. We still need to polish the feature a bit, but we wanted to get your feedback first to make sure we’re on the right track. Here are some screenshots of what you’ll see:

  Create a new access URL from the SWF Detail page:
  

  Shared stats log:
  

Please let us know what you think about the new Shared Stats feature via email, blog, or forum.

I’ve seen a lot of origami art, but this type of paper art takes things to a whole new level. Each piece starts with an 8.5″x11″ piece of paper and what they end up with is beyond belief. The site is in Korean, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Click here to view

We just pushed out a build today to address some bugs and add a couple minor features. They are as follow:

• Email preferences - We added a new section to the Account Settings page to manage the emails that you get from us. We’ve only sent out about one or two emails to everyone in the past four months, but I sometimes hate receiving unsolicited emails so we added this feature to avoid irritating anyone. It’s all about the karma.
• Traffic report bug fix - There was a problem with the totals not adding up in the Traffic Report if you stayed on the page and kept hitting the refresh button. I doubt that many of you do this, but it was nice for the one guy who found it to report the bug. Please continue to report bugs if you run into them. Especially for those of you who do crazy things with the site.

That’s a pretty short list, but there were other changes that we made behind the scenes that will improve the performance of the site.

Our next build will have a few more cool features that you all have been asking for. The email preferences page that we added to this build will accommodate a way for you to subscribe to daily, weekly, and monthly emails with your stats delivered right to your doorstep. We’ll also release a way to share your SWF stats with other people (i.e., clients, friends, people you want to brag to, etc.) so that you don’t have to give out your account info.

That’s it for now. I hope you guys are building some cool things to track!

We’ll be upgrading our servers over the weekend so there will be a break in the data that’s captured on Sunday, November 13, 2005 from 12:00pm - 3:00pm PST.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

The MochiBot Team