1. Put up a pointless piece of animated flashturbation to fill the space and make it look like intentional emptiness.
2. Put some actual freakin' content on the front page.
Shelly had no idea why I'd tuck away the links to the games on a separate page, so I eliminated the games page and put the links to the games on the front page. I also put together a couple of silly animated buttons for the games so it wouldn't just be dull text-links.
The upshot of all of this is that the link I gave you yesterday for the games no longer works. If you wanna play the new games, go right to the main page at www.thecodezone.com and the links will be unmistakable.
Another thing Shelly mentioned that I need is to give the top player his props by showing off his solution to the puzzle. That means that I'll likely be making a miniature "playback" applet for each game. It'll look like the puzzle, but it'll be noninteractive apart from a "play" button that'll play back the winning solution. I'll also need to start recording your solution as you play it and storing that in the database too, so I can pass that along to the playback app.
Or I can just write more daily puzzles. What would you prefer?
Oh, and another thing that deserves mention. It's PHPObject from Ghostwire Studios. It's a very simple (and free) chunk of PHP code that simplifies function-calling between client-side Flash and server-side PHP. There are at least a dozen good Flash-server solutions out there, but they were all overkill for my needs. PHPObject is as simple as possible and solved all of my problems.
