This post is a random rant of my passion for building online games, and a discussion with myself about the development of Rags to Riches Game – a PHP, mySQL, AJAX, Java game I’ve been building for the past 4 years.

So I’ve been building online games for that past 10 years. It started as a hobby, and quickly became an obsession! I’ve stuck to mainly building web games using PHP, mySQL, AJAX – and stayed away from Flash (even though I’ve touched on it a bit).

I built Create or Conquer in 2006, which was an online game system to allow players to not only play the game, but to contribute content to it. I set up a Fantasy game world called Malmon, and built the initial game content. I wanted to keep the interface relatively simple and fast loading, so I used a number of small sections (called Sectors) for my game.

I wanted to model my game after the games I grew up playing in the 80s (I’m not that old), so I wanted a good old fantasy rpg like Dungeons and Dragons. Pretty standard stuff like stats – health, fatigue, strength, mind, luck, battling with weapons like swords, bows etc, and using spells.

But I also wanted to add the new era of gaming to my game – crafting. I love the ability to make new items, armor, weapons, spells, tools to advance my character. I’ve always been in love with crafting, even though so many of my friends find it bores them to death. Sometimes I find killing endless monsters boring as well. So I invented a building in my game world called – a crafthouse. I also created special items called ‘recipes’ that players can find and each recipe requires specific items, resource or tools in order to make the item.

I wanted to also combine the ‘auction house’ concept to my game. I first got the ‘consigner’ idea from another online game. So players can sell their items, for a fee, and other players can shop the consigner and buy the items. I eventually took out the fee, because I felt the game didn’t need to take money away from the players. So the ‘merchant’ building was born, and players could list items for sale – either quest items, or crafted items.

Now that my game world has an economy and a means to buy and sell items – I felt it would be helpful for players to have a bank to store extra money. Not a bank like some games where you can store extra items (I created a building called a Vault for that) – but a bank would pay you daily interest for money you leave in your bank account. So for every 1000 gold piece you leave in the bank, you would earn 0.01% interest. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but put 50,000 gold in the bank, and you would earn 50g per day. All this is relative to the cost of equipment etc in the game, but I felt it would help casual players earn some money without having to login daily to play.

As I mentioned, I created a vault building where players can store extra items. These vaults exist all through the game world and you can stop in anytime to add items. There is a limited number of spots available in your vault, to a max of 50 items. So cities have crafthouses near vaults, so it’s easy to put all your resources in the vault, travel to the city and then you’re close range for crafting.

Movement has been the biggest issue. So many players want games like Everquest and WOW to play – but the technology is just so advanced – that a small time game builder like myself just can’t do it. This is a hobby, even though I have 1000s of hours of development into Create or Conquer. I found a great opensource game engine (written in Java) called GTGE (thanks PauPau!). GTGE allowed me to use a java applet for my map interface, and I know enough about Java to code a bit of custom working into it to connect it to Create or Conquer.

I created a multi-map system where players could walk to the edge of one map and start on another using ‘map exits’. These points are just x/y coordinates on the game map. I also took this ability and make ‘doormats’ for buildings, caves and random encounters. If a player steps onto one of these doormats, they can click a button in the game interface and go into the area.

So this took the Create or Conquer concept and broadened the horizon of what the game could look like, hence Rags to Riches game.

R2RG was 4 months in development. I planned a ton of the game content prior to even starting to gather resources. I researched monsters (over 300 of them), spells (over 100), weapons (over 100), and then started to build my races and towns/villages.

The initial content is complete. Players are able to roam through the main starter village (Village Grodo), fight monsters, craft items, perform quests, and more.

I’ve built a game wiki so players can better understand how to play the game

R2RG Wiki
wiki.ragstorichesgame.info

Just by looking at the categories in the wiki, you can see all the functionality R2RG has!

Create a free account
www.ragstorichesgame.info

I hope you enjoy playing the game. I like feedback, so please contact me if you want to say something nice Until you start building your own online game, you don’t really understand how much time and effort it takes.

Do you have a PHP website that isn’t a WordPress site? Do you wish you were able to allow your visitors to easily promote and bookmark your webpages? I’ve built this easy lite PHP tool that will display many popular social bookmarking icons on your page and allow your visitors to bookmark and promote your pages!

This is PHP Sociable in action!

PHP Sociable – PHP Social Booking Script

How Does PHP Sociable Work?

PHP Sociable is an extremely simple PHP script.  It consists of a configuration file, and an output file – that’s it.  You add your social site name, urls and icon names to the config file and you’re in business!  PHP Sociable is smart enough to figure out the current page’s url and automatically link it to each icon for submission.  Now all you have to do is click the sociable icon and submit your page’s url to their website.

How Easy is it to Add to my Website?

As easy as 1, 2, 3! Update the configuration file with your settings, upload the files to your website hosting account, and test the page to make sure your urls are linking with each icon! If you know how to use Notepad/Textpad text editor, and basic FTP to upload files – you can set PHP Sociable up in less than 10 minutes.

Just add these few lines of PHP code to your website’s PHP footer file, or any PHP page on your website.


<?php
// PHP Sociable include by www.custom-coding.com
include_once "php_sociable/php_sociable.php";
?>

I’ve included a readme file to walk you through the steps of setting up and configuring PHP Sociable for your website. If you have any questions, I’m always an email away

HANG ON! I have a Javascript Sociable version too – $14.95 USD!

*This one below is the WordPress Sociable widget, not to be confused with it. PHP Sociable will not work with WordPress, but works great on other PHP-based websites.

Project: Easy HTML Comments
Technologies: AJAX, PHP, Text Files
Price: $14.95 USD

For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page

Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results?

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google Breadcrumbs display

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

What are some best practices for indicating breadcrumbs?

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.

“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Original Article

Yahoo Answer Alerts is going to revolutionize how affiliate marketers use Yahoo Answers!

What is Yahoo Answers?

Yahoo Answers is located at www.answers.yahoo.com and receives literally 1000s of question requests per day. Yahoo Answers is a powerful tool for affiliate marketers and bloggers to open the lines of communication with potential customers by posting answers to questions.  As person who asks a question if referred to as the ‘asker’. To become an asker or an answerer, you can login with your Yahoo profile, or create a free account.

What is Yahoo Answer Alerts?

Yahoo Answer Alerts is a web service that monitors Yahoo Answers for new questions twice an hour. We would like to monitor Yahoo Answers more often, but we don’t want to go against Yahoo Answers’s Terms of Use. We are able to retrieve the 50 recent questions asked for all topics via Yahoo Answers’s RSS feeds. Receiving email alerts about hot question topics is a wonderful thing for an affiliate marketes or blogger. The goal of posting answers to Yahoo Answers questions is to build a back link to your website, affiliate landing page, blog – or all 3!

Who uses Yahoo Answer Alerts?

Yahoo Answer Alerts can be used by anyone, but Yahoo Answer Alerts’ service is mainly targeted to affiliate marketers, bloggers, and product-selling website owners.  Affiliate Marketers: Affiliate marketing is all about building back links to your landing page to earn a commission when the customer makes a purchase. By answering questions at Yahoo Answers, you can find your customer asking a question that pertains to your product.

Example: You have Yahoo Answer Alerts monitoring the keyword ‘diet’. You will receive email alerts each time a new question has the keyword ‘diet’ in the title, description or category name. An affiliate marketer can be first in line to give their well thought out answer that precisely describes a valuable solution to the asker’s question, and a helpful link to more information (your landing page), can also be provided.

Bloggers: Blogging can earn revenue for a blogger in many ways. Affiliate commission, direct product sales, and advertising revenue (Google Adsense) are just a few ways bloggers can make money. Bloggers are just as interested in Yahoo Answer Alerts as affiliate marketers.

Product Selling Website Owners: A website owner selling jewellery or any product can reap the benefits of Yahoo Answer Alerts. Yahoo Answers is a marketplace of customer’s asking questions. Some people are looking for advice, such as product reviews, and others just want to find a solution to their problem – “where can I buy…”.

Example: An asker posts a question about where to buy crystal figurines. You, or someone you know, has an online store that sells crystal figurines. They either have a brick & mortar store, and online store where they have their own product, or they have a drop-shipping account and they just fill the orders and another company delivers the products.

If you’re promoting multiple product niches you may want to create many different Yahoo accounts to post answers. Grouping all your answers under one Yahoo Answers profile will make you look like a ‘generalist’ and will also expose all your other answers – potentially exposing your other niches to other affiliate marketers.

Be the 3 C’s

Be courteous when posting answers to questions. Take the time to post an informative, positive answer to maintain a good name for your Yahoo Answers profile.

Be creative when posting your answer. Don’t just put a one sentence reply to the question – give some detail, show your expertise, and build a name for your Yahoo Answers profile. The more effort and quality you put into your answers – the better chance your answer will be selected.

Be cautious when posting answers to questions. Utilizing Yahoo Answers as a marketplace to post answers that promote affiliate links and products can potentially get your Yahoo Answers profile flagged or banned. Be sure you understand Yahoo Answers’s Terms Of Use when posting answers, to ensure you don’t post an answer that goes against the rules. Don’t be spammy with your answers, pick and choose questions to reply to, or reply to questions over a number of days – so not to raise suspicion.

Check out Yahoo Answer Alerts for yourself, they have a 7 day trial for $1!

Watch a 9 minute video and see Yahoo Answer Alerts in action

Become a Yahoo Answer Alerts affiliate

Project:

Have your say! Let your voice be heard! Want to start a web petition on your website? Here’s a easy script to install that allows your visitors to sign your website’s web petition.

How does this web petition work?

When visitors come to your web site, they can go to your petition page or you can embed the petition right into your homepage. All the visitor has to do is fill in their name, and they’ve signed up.

How easy is it to install? I’m not a techie!

The PHP Easy Web Petition is super simple to install. It comes with a readme script, and of course I’ll answer any questions you have by email.  Just upload the files and you’re in business!

What other fancy features does it have?

The PHP Easy Web Petition is pretty slick! It can do all sorts of things, here’s a few:

1. Email notifications: If you want to know when someone signs your petition (and what their name was) you can get an email notification.
2. Bad Word Filter: Gosh no! People might mistreat your petition and try to swear on it – not to worry! You can create a custom ‘banned words’ list and stop people from taking advantage of your petition.
3. Manage your petition: There is a password protected admin section where you can delete names from your list if you wish.
4. Page Navigation: You don’t have to have 100s of names all on one page, you can set how many names to show per page and have some nice little arrow buttons to allow your visitors to go page-to-page to see who’s who on your petition list.
5. Run multiple petitions at one time: Simply set up PHP Easy Web Petition on different pages and you can run as many web petitions as you like!
6. Unique IP Logging: You can set your petition to allow unique submissions by IP address. This will stop people from posting multiple times.

Here’s what PHP Easy Web Petition looks like:

PHP Easy Web Petition is easy to set up and host your own online petition

Looking for a sample:

Keep Affiliate Cookies Live – Join the Fight!

If you have any questions about PHP Easy Web Petition, please don’t hesistate to contact me. I’m always happy to answer questions. If you’d like me to set up PHP Easy Web Petition on your website, I’ll gladly do that for a small fee of $25 USD when you purchase the product.

I love UsedVictoria.com and have been buying items from sellers on their website for years now. UsedVictoria.com works alot like Ebay but there isn’t an auction involved. You see the item you want – and you contact the seller to buy it. Pretty simple – I think not!

My biggest problem on UsedVictoria.com is that by the time I found the item I wanted to buy (a composter box), 5 other people had already contacted the seller and the item was sold!

So I found I was missing out on items too much – so the programmer in me created www.usedvicalerts.com

UsedVicAlerts.com is a handy website tool that lets you sign up for free and submit names of items you want to search for on UsedVictoria.com.

Here’s how UsedVicAlerts.com spots a new item.  An automated task runs hourly checking the UsedVictoria.com site for new items that have titles or descriptions that match your search words.   When a matching item (or similar item) is found, you will receive an email or text message to advised you to go check the UsedVictoria.com website.

I haven’t missed an item yet in my last 3 purchases. And I get updated to watch for apartments for rent as well. A very handy tool – free to use, and check out UsedVicAlerts.com on Twitter.

Not sure what the story is. I’ve checked http://status.twitter.com/ to see what Twitter has to say about their ‘downness’, and they have nothing new to say.

Drop me a tweet when they’re back up! Hurry!

Twitter was last down on Aug 6, 2009 – see article below.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/06/twitter-down/

Not entirely sure if it may be another D.O.S attack (Denial of Service), where the Twitter site receives so much traffic (usually fake traffic, just a bunch of requests) that the servers can’t handle it.

Let’s cross our fingers and get ready to tweet when Twitter is back up!

p.s: Oh, and it’s not a scheduled downage, where you get a page saying ‘We’re doing maintenance’ – I’m getting a 403 error for www.twitter.com

p.p.s: I see that Twitter was also down on Aug 11, 2009 – maybe it’s a monthly thing (let’s hope not!)

http://mashable.com/2009/08/11/twitter-down-its-not-just-you/

Don’t get scammed – Report Online Scams

Project:

Everyone has an opinion – like everyone has a pulse! Why not allow the visitors who visit your website to vote on what’s hot, or what’s not?

I’ve created this simple PHP voting script, using PHP (obviously) as the backend, and AJAX for real-time updating in a static HTML page. All vote data is logged in a series of text files created for each vote topic when you set it up.

How easy is it to set up this PHP voting script?

Brutally easy! Upload a folder of 3 files, include some JavaScript include lines in your webpage, and add the voting code – and you’re done!

How easy is it to setup multiple votes with this PHP voting script?

Insanely easy! If your website is set up with a template, you’ve already got the JavaScript includes – so you’re half done. Just paste the voting code into another webpage and you’re in business.  Multiple votes on one page not available with this version. Contact me for a custom quote.

What about multiple votes?

Can a visitor sit there and spam my PHP voting script and skew my results? Nope! There’s a variable in the setup file where you can either allow, or not allow multiple votes. Each vote has its IP address logged, and is compared each time a vote is submitted.

So there you have it, an easy PHP voting script – ready to use, instant download, yours for a very affordable price.