The upgrade was seamless, which was a relief seeing as my old version of Wordpress was pretty ancient. Anyway, please keep an eye out for any oddities and let me know if anything is weird (I know that the photopress plugin is a bit broken, so when you click on images they get overwritten by the sidebar).

I also added a Most Popular section to the sidebar, which I’m very pleased with. At some point I want to add a recent posts list too (or popular recent posts). I could even add a Recommended section as the most popular aren’t necessarily the best ones (imho). However, this will just make the sidebar ultra long so maybe a smart way to do it would maybe be with some kind of tabbed control – although I’ve got no idea how to do that as HTML/php is not my forté (perhaps one of you has heard of a plugin for such a thing?)

Other changes are; I renamed Categories to Topics which is a tip I learned from Tim Feriss (excellent blog if you’ve never checked it out – also I recommend his book), and I moved my Twitter status down a bit so that people don’t click on it and exit the blog.

Now I’ve got to get used to the new Wordpress look and capabilities. Anything really cool I should know about?

The crappy little hit counter I have on the bottom of the site now reads 800,000+

In Feb 2009 it was at 500,000 hits so that’s 300,000 hits in the last 11 months, which = 27000+ hits a month.

These last 11 months have shown the most hits ever, despite me blogging slightly less than normal due to the fact that micro-blogging on Twitter is just so damn easy and fun! (If you would like to follow me on Twitter, check out the link over on the top right of the blog).

Back in Feb 2009 I thought I might hit 1,000,000 hits by now, but it seems like that figure is a few months off yet. Still that will be a great milestone to reach! And it seems so close now

In December, Big Fish Games promoted my Holiday Bonus game using their Daily Deal programme. Basically game club members got offered my game for only $2.99, but for one day only.

The result was a really good amount of sales at an insanely high conversion rate (well into double figures). Needless to say, I’m very pleased with the result. It’s bolstered the total sales of Holiday Bonus nicely.

I love the fact that the game keeps on delivering year after year, especially as I was so passionate about making that game. I produced, designed, programmed and marketed that game by myself (with additional excellent feedback by the game’s artist) and I had no idea how well it was going to do, but it’s done good

So if you can get on the Big Fish Games Daily Deal, do it! If your game is good, and timed right (e.g. Christmas game at Christmas) you’ll do good too!