Apparently out there on the internet, unbeknownst to me, there are entire sites dedicated to mashups. “Mashup” of course is one of those words people love to hate, but for better or worse it is attached to anything on the internet that uses an api and is remotely cool. I guess DiggKiller qualifies. In the past few days, I’ve been selected as a “Mashup of the Day” on two different sites. The first is programmableweb.com. I found out about this by checking the referrer traffic for my site and noticing the domain, and checking it out. The site must not have that much traffic, because I never heard of it before and they only forwarded me about 60 hits. Also, there are currently no “comments” on the page, a good indicator of anemic traffic.

The second site looked a little more credible. It’s mashupawards.com and I was notified of my award through an email (which means they actually had to visit the site, read my little blurb at the bottom and find my email address). They even urged me to choose a cool badge to display on my site, like this one:

At first I thought this was a lame excuse to get more traffic to a second-rate site, by picking a cool thing everyday and then linking back to their site with these awards. It’s a classic technique to increase traffic and google ranking. But then I noticed that the site actually looks pretty badass, and they don’t have a single advertisement on it. How to they make money? Who knows.

I guess the thing that’s truly amazing is that in the land of web 2.0, sites exist that give out awards every day that are HAND PICKED by the site’s creators, instead of being automagically chosen by user voting and complex promotion algorithms. It’s refreshing to see some people kickin’ it old school, and to me, kind of gives these awards more value. I just remembered fuzzwich does that too. Maybe it’s a new wave of retro-humanized editorial voting systems?  Maybe I just spend too much time on digg.

This is kinda cool. My game DiggKiller is now considered a “hot new game” on Kongregate, and thusly appears on their front page. See if you can find it:

Good shit, if you haven’t played it yet do it!

Man, I feel stupid. Turns out those security errors from Kongregate were being thrown thanks to my lack of a crossdomain.xml file that allows access to data from off-domain swfs. kurtmargenau.com didn’t have one, so any calls to my hiscore phps were being rejected by flash, because the default is if it doesn’t find this magic xml file on the root of the domain, it doesn’t allow it to access any info from that domain. This xml file btw, is a list of domains that are allowed to access. For example, I would put “www.kongregate.com” on the list so my high scores worked, but to make it simple, I just allowed all domains, like so:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!– http://www.kurtmargenau.com/crossdomain.xml –>
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain=”*” />
</cross-domain-policy>

Now all the folks at Kongregate can battle for high scores!

Kongregate is a pretty sick flash games community where a bunch of people play a bunch of flash games. I just submitted DiggKiller to it, now that the digg-craze has died down a bit, I’m reaching a new audience. Plus they share their ad revenue with me. YAY! Doesn’t look too bad, despite being scrunched a little smaller than the original size. Had to finagle some of the code to get it to work, and for some reason, the hi scores throw security errors when they try to load, despite the sounds, and the digg stories loading from offsite. Whatever. It’s cool.

Check it out on Kongregate

or Play it on my site (hi scores work)

Right now I’m blazin on puttin’ some high score tables in my game, and among the numerous asinine “Duplicate variable definition” warnings, ironically, Flash gave me the craziest most thoughtful compile warning I’ve ever seen. It made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside:

“Appending text to a TextField using += is many times slower than using the TextField.appendText() method”

Damn Adobe, thanks for the tip. How many languages do you know of that do THAT?

For awhile now, the flash on my site has been broken. I was an idiot, and hardcoded in the url to my blog into the flash (instead of XMLing it like I did for all the projects and stuff), which at the time was hosted on the CoC. When I graduated, they deleted the hell out of it and that link 404ed to nowhere. I’ve had to have an ugly “blog link broken” disclaimer in the news section on my front page. Weak.

Now I know right now you’re thinking.. “Kurt u n00b, just change the .fla file and re-compile!!” You’d be right, that is, if I still had the source. When my laptop got stolen last november, the .fla went with it. Now you’re probably saying.. “pleez.. just haX0r the swf filez with a dec0mpiler!..” That’s actually a good idea and is exactly what I just did, once I found the right decompiler. It looks like Flasm is the perfect thing. It doesn’t try to re-build the entire .fla file so you can edit it in Flash, but decompiles the bytecode into readable text, so you can change variables and whatnot. Since all I needed to change was the text of the link, it took me about 30 seconds. I recommend this pimpass little command line program to anyone who lost their source and needs to made very minor changes that shouldn’t have been hardcoded anyway. Like me. No more broken links!