MochiBot Blog

Things are winding down around here for the holidays so I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us at Mochi Media. We’re looking forward to an exciting new year with extra features, some new products, new team members, and another open source project for the community.

Best wishes!

The graphs on the site are currently down because of a minor build that got pushed out late last night. We’re working on the issue right now and will have the graphs working again shortly.

*** UPDATE *** This issue has been fixed and everything is working again.

I’ve been using Firefox for over a year now and I can’t begin to express how much happier I am compared to my days with IE. It’s not just the inherent features such as tabbed browsing, better CSS rendering, and the lack of crashes that are nice. The things that I really love are the wide array of extensions that people have built for Firefox. Maybe it’s because I like toys and the ability to tinker, but regardless, my web experience has been greatly improved by some priceless extensions. Here are just a few that I can’t live without:

• MeasureIt - This extension allows you to measure any space on a page in pixels. I use this all the time to check out our page layouts and element sizes.
• ColorZilla - This is an eye dropper tool that let’s you pick out any color on a page and copies the value straight to your clipboard. I often times see great color palettes when I’m surfing so enjoy picking up the colors that I would like to use in the future.
• Mouse Gestures - This extension allows you to execute browser commands such as back, forward, refresh, new window, etc. with a simple move of your mouse. I have commands, bookmarks, javascript commands, you name I’ve got a mouse gesture for it.
• Sage - This is one extension that I can’t live without. It’s a simple yet effective RSS reader built right into the sidebar of Firefox. The nice thing is that you can customize the look and feel of your reader or you can just use one of the many templates that they offer on the site. Aside from email this is how I keep in touch with the rest of the world.

About 38% of our visitors are on IE. I’d like to get that number down below 10%. I’m pursuing this because not only are Firefox users generally happier people (not scientifically proven), but MochiBot also works much better when playing in Firefox. With that said, if you’re not already using Firefox then please go out and get it. *Using the link below also helps feed us for another day*

As an added treat I thought this was pretty clever. Firecat

I had been meaning to post this a while ago, but totally forgot about it. The game is called Jewel Thief and was produced by Duncan Gough at 3RD Sense.

The goal of the game is to grab as many jewels as possible without getting caught. To control the game you just move your mouse around the screen grabbing jewels and avoiding either the trip laser or the detection orb. It sounds simple, but the game speeds up to a frantic pace as you gather more and more jewels. For those that are pushing for a high score you can go for bonuses with color combinations or jewel shape combinations.

This is a well executed game and a great way to procrastinate from whatever you’re busy doing. Just another gem that’s being tracked by MochiBot. hehe

I’m happy to say that we finally have uniques back in the system. They were taken out a few months ago because it was taking way too long for the information to be calculated. This was due to the unexpected growth that we got early on. We’re processing several million hits a day from all the SWFs out there so the amount of data we had to sift through was just too great. But thanks to Bob’s genius we’ve managed to get uniques back into the system on the Traffic Report.

We also made a few cosmetic changes to the Dashboard and the SWF Detail page in order to make the interface a bit more efficient.

We’ve also fixed a bug that was in the MochiBot code which was causing an undeclared variable error message to appear in the development environment. If you have this problem then just go to the SWF Detail page to get the new MochiBot code for your SWF.

As always, let us know what you think of the changes that have been made. mail@mochibot.com

Sorry for the site being so slow today. At first I thought it was just me. My brain has been a bit slow today after being out all night last night with the Hot or Not gang. It’s kind of hard having a Christmas party with just three people in our company so we were invited by the Hot or Not guys to join them at their holiday party. Many thanks to Jim and James for making us feel like family. Needless to say we ate a lot, drank a lot, ate even more and were out till about 4am.

But I digress…we’ve had a maintenance script running since 3am and it’s still going. ack! The system will be much happier once it’s finished so we appreciate your patience.