Game Maker Blog » gamemaker.info

I love gmplanet

Philip Gamble — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:46:46 +0000

When Robin Monk’s Game Maker news aggregator service, gmplanet, was first released I was skeptical at the effect it would have on content producing Game Maker websites. I also feared that GameMaker.info, a customisable Game Maker startpage which I was a big fan of, would be damaged.

A month after the launch of gmplanet clickthroughs from GameMaker.info had declined at planet still lagged far below gamemaker.info in popularity.

In the past month gmplanet has sent just 10% of the number of visits that gamemaker.info has sent our way, but I love it!

The RSS feed that gmplanet provides makes it easy to check the latest Game Maker related news (and some stuff that isn’t Game Maker related and probably shouldn’t be in there) in one place. I have the RSS feed installed on my iGoogle homepage.

The only criticisms I have is that the RSS is sometimes delayed in updating – meaning that despite a hard refresh [ctrl + f5] the feed still sometimes lags behind gmplanet.org. The only other issue is that sometimes news articles of the same story clog up the feed as seen in this screenshot below (taken a while back).

I love gmplanet is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The GMPlanet Effect

Philip Gamble — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 15:00:39 +0000

A month on from the launch of game maker news aggregator gmplanet I have decided to examine if it has had an effect on GameMaker Blog’s traffic levels as I feared it may.

In January one of GameMakerBlog.com’s top referrers, gamemaker.info, sent 114 visits our way. In February however this reduced to just 43 visits, plus 18 visits from the new gmplanet. I’m not sure why there was such a large decrease in the amount of traffic gamemaker.info was sending our way, especially as in February we had 6 more posts than we had in January. Perhaps this can be put down to the introduction of Planet which has reduced the need for a user to click-through to our site in order to view a post. Even for the two posts where I deliberately inserted a ‘more’ tag, both to keep the GameMakerBlog homepage tidy and also in an attempt to get more people to click through from GMPlanet, there were very few clickthroughs.

However I don’t think I can point the blame at Planet for the reduction in traffic sent from gamemaker.info, certainly some people may have switched over but there hasn’t been much publicity for the site, certainly not enough to explain this reduction which can probably be linked to the quality of posts made over here. Overall however February was a more succesful month than January for GameMakerBlog as we saw a 15% increase in the number of pageviews and a 25% increase in the number of unique visitors.

GMPlanet is currently small with an Alexa rank of about 9.5m compared to gamemaker.info’s 4m. Sure, I know Alexa ranks can easily be manipulated but this gives some idea of the distance between these two sites. I hope that GMPlanet will grow, because it is a good site – and I am no longer fearful of the effect it may have on traffic levels.

The GMPlanet Effect is taken from: GameMaker Blog

What’s wrong with this picture?

tuntis — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:21:43 +0000

tuntis will award you a virtual cookie (or something else that sounds moronic) if you figure out the problem with this image!

What’s wrong with this picture? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Interesting Week

Philip Gamble — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:24:54 +0000

It’s been a, how can I put it, interesting past week for GameMakerBlog.

50 comments in a week, inclusion on GameMaker.info‘s relaunch, falling out and making up with Danny’s GMTV and a potential falling out with GMHV. It’s certainly been very eventful at any rate.

Interesting Week is taken from: GameMaker Blog

New Gamemaker.info

Philip Gamble — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 10:09:09 +0000

Simon Donkers has given the GameMaker.info website a face-lift. There are new features available including a customisable startpage, similar to iGoogle. GameMakerBlog is included as one of the default feeds but there is a big selection to choose from, including MarkUp, 64Digits and of course the official news from YoYoGames (if any ever comes).

My homepage will stick at iGoogle, as it is far too useful for me to warrant a change, but even so GameMaker.info is a good place to go to catch up with gamemaker related news as RSS feeds from all the top Game Maker sites are there.

New Gamemaker.info is taken from: GameMaker Blog