OK, honestly this guy is a dumbass, he should have worn long pants too, but who am I to say.

I took a class about driving motorcycles and they had some great insight. There’s a ladder:

Of what rung would you be willing to jump off?

Personally I’d jump off of one of them where you would be impressively harmed but still live.

And if you made it off safely, you’d probably want to go to a higher rung.

Keep Jumping.

To Censor or not to Censor?

Recently, a piece of NSFW (or semi-safe-for-work) content was added to my site, and it got me thinking.

The content itself is quite cute and inventive. It was a small platform game called “Free the Nipple”, and the opening sequence is absolutely hilarious:

But should I allow content like this (or much much more blatant) to be included on the website?

The backstory

I run a site for sharing games in WebGL format and I’m trying to figure out whether I should or should not censor games on the site. Now this particular game is a piece of art in my opinion, and not pornography. Essentially the person who wrote this game is actually begging me to figure out, do I censor games on the site?

BTW, if you’re on a desktop you can play the game right here on Medium:

My values

Violence is commonplace in video games, and there are a certain subset of games that have nudity and sexual content. Generally (in USA anyway), violence is completely accepted but if there’s a female nipple in a movie, for instance, that’s an immediate “R” rating.

To me, this is obviously pretty silly, but what about to my audience?

Does having games with nudity and / or sexual behavior on my site tarnish the reputation of it?

Itch

A competing site for the indy games, Itch does allow some questionable content (I searched for “porn” and “xxx” on their site):

But last year I went to a conference pitching SIMMER, and one high school instructor who teaches game development said that he wouldn’t send his kids to share their games on the Itch site because they allowed so much sexual content.

Traffic

Another borderline game I have on my site involves feeding a fat furry-style creature donuts:

Again, this content is well made and not directly pornographic. And it sends A LOT of traffic to the site. If a type of content sends a lot of new users to my site, I feel like I should not ignore it. Should I add a “feed the fat furry a donut” category to the site? Or should I censor all fat-furry-donut-feeding content?

What would you do?

For me, I’m totally on the fence. If I allow full-on porn games, does that mean that parents won’t send their kids to the site to share their creations? Does that make me a hypocrite for allowing bloody violent games, even though I think they’re way more damaging than showing a nipple or two?

Maybe I should start an adults only section? (Kids will ALWAYS pay attention to the warning dialogs for adult content! </sarcasm>).

I honestly don’t know where to go next, will you let me know your thoughts?

Please give this article a clap or two or follow SIMMER on twitter if you enjoyed my writing :-).

To Censor or not to Censor was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past year I helped a lot of people learn and even made a few bucks in the process. A few unexpected things happened as well.

So here’s the story of my 17+ months as a Udemy instructor.

I got started in early 2017 — spending evenings and weekends recording a tech class about Google Chrome Developer Tools. It was a subject that I knew deeply, and, after purchasing a few of the top sellers on the subject, I knew that I could produce a course that would be significantly more detailed.

So I dropped a few hundred bucks on equipment (a nice microphone and some video editing software), and also decided to run a promotion to help get early reviews. I would donate $10 to Mission Bit for the first fifty written reviews. (Read the full story)

I was able to market the course fairly well to my friends and family, and eventually, people started buying! I also produced a second free introductory course and answered a number of questions on StackOverflow and Quora to help set up a sales funnel.

I earned the bestseller tag on my paid course, and the first few months were great, netting me about $600-$700 in revenue a month while I worked my full time job. After that, sales leveled off at the $200-$300 level (which I still make today).

Read the story below to hear more about how I climbed the rankings in Udemy:

Race to the Top: The Online Tech Teaching Hustle

I’m happy to say that, on this single course I’ve made nearly $6K to date! Based on the time I put in, that dollar amount is still a bit less than my engineering consulting rate, but the work was fulfilling, and I got a kick out of:

• Helping people learn.
• Producing something that was good enough that people would buy it.
• Doing something on my own that wasn’t just an exchange of hours for money.

An Inspiration

Making that money on my own inspired me to try to break away from the “salary for hours” lifestyle. So later that year, I decided to quit my job and give my real passion a go. I would combine my love of web programming and game programming to release a site called simmer.io that would help game developers share games seamlessly in the web browser.

That venture is going reasonably well in terms of growth (over 2000 developers have signed up for the site and about 2000 games and demos have been shared), but I’m still searching for that silver revenue bullet to make that site a financial success. I’ll keep you posted.

Fringe Benefits

Teaching a course online is a huge resume booster, and was a great feather in my cap for when I was seeking speaking engagements to promote SIMMER. For instance, I was able to speak at Google for an HTML5 event and at Unity Unite (video game developers conference) based partly on the merits of being an online instructor.

Another benefit was that I got to attend the Udemy Live conference for instructors. I got to meet my favorite online instructor, Maximilian Schwarzmüller. This guy is an absolute powerhouse of course creation with some of the best production values I’ve seen for tech courses.

In person Max was quite humble. I mentioned to him that my course was nowhere near the quality of his, and he told me to watch his first course. He reminded me that this is an iterative process and you get better with time and practice.

I’ve been to many tech conferences, but I absolutely loved attending Udemy Live because I was surrounded by people with an entrepreneurial spirit. This sort of energy is lacking at most “geek” conferences that I’ve attended. At Udemy Live, I met authors of some of my favorite tech books, and even had dinner with a guy that is selling a course about going on an African photo safari.

Back to Work

Around December 2017, I did start to panic a bit. My gaming website had not gained funding and didn’t have a true revenue stream yet, so I busted out my LinkedIn skills to earn some contract work. I did about a month of work for a printing startup called Brandly, and then did a seven month contract at Gliffy, a former employer.

Overall, consulting has been fairly lucrative. I definitely miss the steady paycheck, but there have been less overall hours for similar pay.

The Second Paid Course

As my Gliffy contract was wrapping up, I had to decide what to do next. I could build out a course to make some semi-passive income, or focus all my energy on SIMMER.io.

I decided on something in the middle — I would make a course specifically about building and deploying games for the web with the Unity game engine. This would serve three purposes:

1. I have a community of 2000+ developers on my gaming site that are the exact target market for the course. I can now market the course to those folks.
2. In the course, I mention my gaming site as [one of the many] deployment platform for games. This will provide some brand awareness and potentially lead to more signups.
3. I can reformat some of the course content into several blog articles, shorter subject-based youtube videos, or perhaps a downloadable e-book. More content = more SEO = better awareness for both SIMMER and my courses!

Improving Production Values

While I stand behind the content of my first course as some of the best instruction available for Chrome Developer Tools, some of the production values definitely needed some work. There was poor lighting, uneven audio quality, and plenty of video of me looking unkempt and unshaven ;-).

For this go around, I purchased some better lighting, a green screen, [and a razor], and took a course on Screenflow to improve my video editing skills. I also decided that I would be an on-camera talking head for the entire course. Trust me — it is really hard to code live on camera, but with some practice and editing frustration, I believe I’ve created a something that will lead to much higher student engagement.

Producing this course went WAY over my time budget. I had hoped that I could complete it in two full work-weeks, but alas, the finished product took five weeks or more. This course was harder to produce than the Developer Tools course because I needed to create projects from start-to-finish, rather than simply stepping through the UI of a known tool.

I can only hope that, as I start building additional courses, there will be more opportunity for cross promotion for students that enjoy my teaching style.

The Plug

My new course about WebGL with Unity went live today, and my Medium readers can get it here at 92% off (only ten bucks!). Inside you can learn about building cutting edge games for the browser. I’ll probably pull this coupon on or around Oct 2, so get it today!

If you’re a web developer interested in dabbling with WebGL and Unity or a game developer looking to deploy games to the web, now would be a great time to check out this course.

In Conclusion

Some of the course creators that got in the game early are making some pretty staggering cash — into the 7 figures range. There is somewhat of a winner-take-all element to the marketplace (the top React course, for instance will continue to be the top React course for a long while).

I can definitely see that the marketplace for courses is getting somewhat saturated, but I hope that, by creating a course in a somewhat niche topic, my instruction will stand apart from the crowd.

Personally, I’m going to take a cautious approach to building courses — I want to build lessons in topics where I’m an expert, but I also need to consider the big picture and follow through with my investment in my website for game developers.

Please clap or follow me on Medium if you enjoyed this article! It gives me a ton of motivation to keep writing!

… and get 92% off WebGL with Unity the Ultimate Guide

The Online Tech Teaching Hustle: My Year with Udemy was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My experience with on-demand co-working started a bit rocky, but I’m excited about the possibilities! Here’s what happened when I became a member of Croissant co-working over the past year.

The Backstory

About a year ago, I decided to break out of the San Francisco tech rat race, and give my business idea a shot. I was fresh off of releasing an online course about Chrome Developer Tools that was actually starting to make some real money, so I was pretty high on the idea that I could build things that people would pay for.

So I put in notice at my company TINT, and decided to give it a go. Of course the team was sad to see me go, but Tim Sae Koo the CEO was excited that I would be taking the plunge into entrepreneurial world.

Online teaching, while successful for me, was not really an end-game. I knew that I could make some incremental profits, but I had something bigger in mind. I would build a website for game developers that would make it incredibly easy to put their games on the web.

After doing a little bit of research I found a co-working space specifically for game developers in San Francisco called GameNest. I liked the idea of getting out of the little bubble of my home office, and actually working with indie game developers.

Honestly it was great. It was a welcoming community and I got a chance to pitch my idea around and learn from people around me.

Sadly, about 3 months in to my tenure at GameNest, I found out that the people who run the space were coming to the end of their lease, and the landlord wanted to double their rent. The space ended up closing, and I was back to working out of my home office every day.

The Wifi (and Poop) Problem

At this point, I had found a decent solution for getting out of my house, I would work out of POPOS (privately owned public open spaces).

While the idea was alluring there were two problems: access to great wifi, and the fact that I needed to completely pack up every time I needed to go poop.

Giving Croissant a Try

Back at my tenure at TINT, I had remembered that a remote co-worker of mine, Brad Singley, working out of NYC, had suggested that I check out Croissant co-working. They didn’t require long-term commitments, so I decided to sign up for their “Creator” plan.

I only needed to get out of my home office occasionally, so the mid-tier plan worked for me. I also liked the idea of the five “guest” hours so that I could occasionally invite friends to join me.

A Rocky Start

The first day I decided to go check out a space with my friend Tony Lownds who was also working remote for a very small business-card startup called Brandly. Croissant had a bunch of spaces available and we settled on checking out The Payne Mansion hotel.

When we got there, it honestly was a bit of a disappointment. There was a small cafe in the back where we stopped and asked about the Croissant co-working space. The barista didn’t really know what we were talking about so he radioed up to his manager, then said “Have a seat, you’re in the co-working space!” He was also kind enough to offer us some free coffee.

While the space was quite nice (and the Wifi was great!), to me, the idea of paying hourly to sit in a hotel lobby was kind of silly. I could probably get away with this at just about any hotel in SF for free.

So at lunchtime we signed out of the app and grabbed some grub. We then decided to relocate to another space called The BirdNest.

The space was also a bit quirky, but an interesting concept. Apparently BirdNest had rented out a restaurant called Hazel during their off hours (9–5), and had set up appropriate plugs and solid wifi.

Here, the woman at the front knew about Croissant, but didn’t understand the concept of guest hours on the app. Eventually she let us in and gave us a light sales pitch about Birdnest co-working. They had free coffee, tea, and water, and it was actually a pretty pleasant place to work.

As a quick note: BirdNest and Payne Mansion are no longer available on the Croissant App.

Things got much better!

I was definitely unsure about whether Croissant would meet my needs at this point, but I still had a bunch of hours left, so why not try a few new spaces?

The following week I had an appointment over in Oakland, so I decided to try out OakStop for a few hours:

This space was a lot closer to what I had in mind as a co-working space. It had plenty of plugs and decent wifi, and there was a front desk that immediately knew about the Croissant app. It was also great to have a workspace available across the bay where I could get in a few hours before my meeting.

Over the next couple of weeks I visited a few other spaces that definitely met my needs. Most (if not all) were semi-private and offered good wifi and bathrooms.

Back to the Grind & Rollover Hours

About six or seven months into my entrepreneurial stint (and about two months after joining Croissant), I realized that it is damn hard to pay San Francisco rent and try to bootstrap a business. So I decided to do some contracting at a previous employer four days a week. The goal there was to get them trained up on some old code I wrote, so it was most effective for me to work out of their offices.

At this point I had about 50 hours available in my Croissant account. Because my contracting gig was planned to be six months or less, I decided not to cancel my Croissant account, but to change to their lowest-tier offering, the Explorer plan. Thankfully they had a pretty generous rollover plan that allowed me to keep most of my hours.

The rollover hours definitely came in handy about three months into my contracting gig.

I live in San Francisco, but my wife works near Berkeley (and commutes with my one-year-old boy to daycare). She had gone on a business trip and I was left figuring out how to drop of my son at day care and work my contracting job.

It turns out Croissant offered a few co-working spaces in Berkeley, so I was able to drop off my son and work for the day without commuting back into the city.

The space was called NextSpace in Berkeley:

It was not a bad little spot and they had some nice privacy rooms where I was able to Skype with my co-workers. Additionally they invited me to a gathering that they were having after hours (but I could not attend because of my little boy).

A hybrid approach

Now that my bank account is padded a little bit, I’m back to working full-time on my business. I’m still working though my rollover hours and occasionally using Croissant.

I’ve been mostly working out of Impact Hub in SF:

It’s a really great workspace (with a back yard) but on a pretty shitty block in SF near 16th and Mission BART.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work out of the UCSF Library (outside of Croissant). They have great views and decent wifi, but the desks are not that ergonomic and I still have to pack up all of my stuff to go poop.

I’ve also been using Covo and Workshop Cafe (which are on the Croissant app):

The nice thing about Covo and Workshop Cafe is that these spaces also offer hourly rates. This will be a great option if I burn through all my Croissant hours in a month.

Additionally these two venues also offer food and drink (beer and wine at Covo!). That’s nice because if I want to camp out for a full day I don’t even need to burn an hour going out for lunch.

A Phone Call with Croissant

One thing also worth noting is that one of the founders of Croissant scheduled a thirty minute phone call with me about my experience. I spoke Nisha Garigarn and she was pretty eager to hear about what I was working on and how I was using the service. They’re out of NYC and are growing their business to a whole bunch of locations worldwide.

I mentioned to her about my initial experience and a few other nits (slow wifi at one of the spaces), and it sounds like they’re totally open to improving and expanding the service.

My Overall Opinion

Overall, I’m totally digging my experience with Croissant. It has given me an opportunity to get out of the house without renting an expensive office. I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with a friend using my guest hours, and the flexibility to visit various locations around the Bay Area. I also like that it’s month-to-month with no deposit or long-term commitment.

Combined with using a few free workspaces like the UCSF library and various coffee shops, Croissant is a cost effective way to get out of the house and not go stir crazy.

Here’s the link to get your first week free and $20/off your first month.

I hope you enjoyed this article! If you did, I’d appreciate a tweet, a “clap” or a follow :-).

I had tried out WordPress years ago (think mid 2000’s), and thought it was clunky and somewhat difficult to use. Therefore when starting the blog for my website https://simmer.io, I decided I wanted to try something different.

After some research I found a blogging tool called Ghost. I really liked that it supported markdown and HTML directly, and was also a fan of the server running on node.js vs instead of PHP.

I’m not one to get in huge wars about programming languages, but in my experience PHP is slow and difficult to develop and debug. Node.js is the future. Additionally, a 15 year old codebase like WordPress is bound to be a little rough and inefficient.

So, I tried out Ghost on their official website — where they provide the actual hosting service. The price was a little steep ($29/mo) but I wasn’t too deterred because having a fully managed service (upgrades, support, etc) was worth it to me.

But I ran into a pretty big snag with their trial–the biggest problem is that, with a custom domain (blog.simmer.io) I wanted to use HTTPS. Their guide suggested that I put my entire site behind a cloudflare CDN. I tried this but it did damage to my other subdomains–so I had to back that out. I contacted Ghost support and they said there was no way to do SSL without Cloudflare.

OK, so there was no way to do SSL with their managed service. But, since Ghost is open source, you can self host it. But I wanted at least a semi-prebuilt solution. So I headed over to Digitalocean which offers a preset installation of Ghost on one of their “droplet” servers.

This process wasn’t too bad. And eventually I was able to set up all my DNS servers to point to the correct server.

A few months later, I went to upgrade Ghost, and this was a far more difficult process. I managed to get my server hosed pretty bad and I had to call in the big guns (a technical director that I used to work with) to get everything back. I was almost certain everything had been deleted. It ended up being a permissions issue, but it was pretty infuriating and killed a day.

So I had been using Ghost for 8–10 months, somewhat happily. I liked editing articles in Markdown format, but one nitpick was that, for workflow reasons, I like to take screenshots to the copy buffer, and paste images directly into the article that I’m writing.

Additionally, while I thought that I liked writing in Markdown, I did find that it sometimes ruined my flow of thinking when I was trying to remember a command rather than simply typing out a thought.

At that point, the Ghost admin panel reminded me that I needed to update again. Ugh, I didn’t want to go through the hassle and pain of the upgrade process.

Additionally, I had been watching a great course on online marketing that highly recommended using WordPress as your CMS / blogging tool of choice. The reasoning was that, there are thousands and thousands of plugins for WordPress built specifically for marketers. And literally 31% of all websites–all websites on the internet run WordPress.

So after a little bit of comparison I decided to use siteground. I like that they automatically update WordPress for you and that they support let’s encrypt SSL.

So far the going has been a little bit rocky with the migration. My major challenge (again) is getting SSL up and running properly. Siteground’s chat support has been pretty solid, but I still don’t have this 100% figured out.

Anyway, so far I’m enjoying using WordPress, and I’m excited about the additional plugins and flexibility that it will offer me over Ghost.

Originally published at blog.simmer.io on August 6, 2018.

I grabbed more than a grand with half a day of research.

A quick disclaimer — my grandma asked me about buying cryptocurrency a few weeks ago. I gave her the best advice, but basically encouraged her to do her own research, and not bet the farm with my inheritance ;-). That goes for you too. Don’t take anything I write here as canon, and read, read, read before you decide to risk any funds, crypto or otherwise.

The backstory — I bought just under 1 BTC back in the Mt Gox days for about $80 bucks. Thankfully I withdrew the currency into a local MultiBit wallet before Mt Gox became insolvent. Eventually I switched to the followup wallet called Multibit HD. For the most part, I completely forgot about Bitcoin until the recent cryptocurrency surge (Dec 2017).

Anyway, on August 1, 2017, a bunch of the Bitcoin miners decided to create a new currency called Bitcoin Cash. They performed a “hard fork” and basically anyone that owned Bitcoin before the split now owned both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash — and was entitled to the same amount of Bitcoin Cash that they already owned in Bitcoin.

I mostly ignored this, but in the past week, since Coinbase started listing Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the new currency, BCH, skyrocketed in value.

Between August 1 and today, I had sold off a chunk of my original BTC for “real money” (also via Coinbase). But I started doing research and it turns out that if I owned one BTC on August 1, I still was entitled to one BCH regardless of my actions after the August 1 fork.

So after some Googling, the best tutorial I found about how to claim BCH from Multibit HD (or various other wallets) was here:

How to get Bitcoin Cash from many wallet/software/services with Coinomi : Coinomi Support

But unfortunately this only worked for Coinomi, an Android app. I didn’t have an Android device lying around. And I’d rather be chemically castrated than go to Walmart to buy one three days before Christmas.

After banging my head against a wall (and watching BCH lose value), I found a Stack Exchange article about how to claim Bitcoin Cash from my Multibit HD Wallet. Essentially, since I still had my wallet words written down from MultiBit HD, I was able to input them into Electron Cash and actually claim my BCH. (It was slightly more complicated than that, see the Stack Exchange article for deetz).

After I got the BCH funds in my Electron Cash wallet, I transferred the BCH over to Coinbase and sold it immediately for USD, because USD can buy last-minute Christmas presents, and mythical coin money can’t (yet).

When I’m not pretending that I know WTF I am doing with Bitcoin, I also run a site called SIMMER.io for sharing WebGL games. If you’re into games or game development check it out!

And don’t forget to clap or follow me on Medium if you enjoyed this article. It provides great motivation for me to keep writing!

I claimed my Bitcoin Cash and You Can Too was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You can create dozens of integrations into other web-apps with one implementation of OEmbed.

OEmbed Primer

So what is it? If you’re a Medium writer and you’ve ever pasted a youtube link (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) into an article, it expands into a full video like this:

Or if I paste a page from TED (https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes), TED’s own video player comes up:

But did you know that OEmbed supports rich content (even as rich as 3D and full video games)? Basically with OEmbed you can fill a responsive iFrame with virtually anything.

Why bother?

I run a website for sharing Unity WebGL games called SIMMER.io. The technology for the site is pretty solid — early adopters who have shared their games are telling me the ease of uploading gives SIMMER a competitive advantage over similar games sites.

But as much as I hate to admit it, good technology is only half the problem. If prospective game developers don’t know about the site, how can they upload their awesome games there?

So, lacking much of a marketing budget, and being a programmer by trade, I turned to OEmbed. OEmbed indirectly allows developers to share games, not only on SIMMER, but also in places like Medium, Kickstarter and Patreon.

A Win-Win

Game developers get added value — the ability to share their games directly on other sites, and I get this sweet loading screen that backlinks to SIMMER:

OEmbed is one of those things that add value to my site, and also will aid in traction, by delivering games to unique places all around the web.

Use Cases

One of SIMMER’s early adopters, Dan Kondratyuk, developer of Nodulus — Open Source Puzzle Game has recently started using the OEmbed feature in an awesome Unity tutorial that he’s written on Medium:

Draw 2D Physics Shapes in Unity

I also could see bloggers writing about games, wanting to include live demos direct on their sites.

I’m working on recruiting developers to try out this feature on Kickstarter so that they can put a playable demo on their pledge page (similar to how many folks are just sharing game videos today). That way, potential backers will never have to leave the pledge page to get a taste of the actual game being built. (Tweet to me if you know of anybody who wants to try this!)

The technical guts

So, the full spec for OEmbed is available at https://oembed.com/, but that article is a little dry and difficult to parse. It also mentions a lot of obsolete OEmbed methods like using XML in addition to JSON which is totally not necessary in 2017.

Let’s see how I implemented OEmbed using this solitaire game from SIMMER.

(Just to be completely clear, game developers don’t have to worry about any of this — this is all implemented by SIMMER out-of-the-box).

The first step is to let OEmbed consumers (ie. Medium, Kickstarter) “know” that the tech is implemented for this page, and that’s as simple as adding this one line to the HTML of my solitaire page:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="https://simmer.io/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsimmer.io%2F%40pkatsaros%2Funitysolitaire" title="Solitaire | SIMMER.io">

This points to an endpoint on my site at https://simmer.io/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsimmer.io%2F%40pkatsaros%2Funitysolitaire.

That endpoint returns a json structure

{
  "provider_url": "https://simmer.io",
  "provider_name": "SIMMER.io",
  "thumbnail_width": 960,
  "thumbnail_height": 600,
  "thumbnail_url": "https://simmercdn.com/unity/nfeauO52WjVFbC84aP8HJqHS9FG3/content/ed3216da-7a17-cba0-f616-bd84b135f351/screens/3.png",
  "author_name": "pkatsaros",
  "title": "Solitaire | SIMMER.io",
  "html": "<iframe width='960' height='600' src=\"https://c.simmer.io/static/unityFrame/index.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsimmercdn.com%2Funity%2FnfeauO52WjVFbC84aP8HJqHS9FG3%2Fcontent%2Fed3216da-7a17-cba0-f616-bd84b135f351&imagePath=screens/3.png\">",
  "width": 960,
  "height": 600,
  "version": "1.0",
  "author_url": "https://simmer.io/@pkatsaros",
  "type": "rich"
}

This adds some metadata about the embed, but most importantly, creates an <iframe> html snippet:

<iframe width='960' height='600' src=\"https://c.simmer.io/static/unityFrame/index.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsimmercdn.com%2Funity%2FnfeauO52WjVFbC84aP8HJqHS9FG3%2Fcontent%2Fed3216da-7a17-cba0-f616-bd84b135f351&imagePath=screens/3.png\">

This is the magic! When we paste the URL (https://simmer.io/@pkatsaros/unitysolitaire) into Medium, it autoexpands into the iFrame above, and we now get this:

…well almost. There’s one more step.

Embed.ly and IFramely

Embed.ly is a site (owned by Medium, actually), that provides the “glue” to help sites like Medium, Kickstarter, and Patreon include these types of embeds. They also act as a simple gatekeeper to make sure that content is not overly obtrusive or buggy.

I had to go in and fill out an application to get SIMMER included. I was a little worried because I didn’t implement the “XML” version of OEmbed, but thankfully they didn’t hassle me about this, and I was actually accepted on my first try within a day or two.

Iframely provides a similar service, although I think they have a more automatic approach to accepting OEmbed providers. They provide a pretty nice tool for debugging OEmbed as well.

Wordpress 🙁

Wordpress supports OEmbed, but only via a whitelist. That means you’ll get auto-expanded embeds for major sites like Youtube and Vimeo, but I’ll have to grease a few palms (haha, not really) to get SIMMER included as an OEmbed provider.

Conclusion

This only took me a day or so to implement, and I could see it helping a lot of startups looking for traction.

Hopefully you can see the power of OEmbed, and the added bonuses that you can get for your customers by implementing it. I think it gives developers a great reason to use SIMMER over other games sites. And I get backlinks and more visibility, so everyone wins.

If you liked this article, I’d really appreciate a 👏 or a follow on Medium. It gives me tons of motivation to keep writing about the cool stuff I’m working on.

Gain valuable traction for your web app with OEmbed was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are two possible scenarios, and I don’t like either of them.

A few weeks ago I launched SIMMER.io, a website for sharing 3D content and games. The early product makes it painless to share WebGL builds created with the Unity game engine.

In reality SIMMER is really a content delivery platform, and will require lots of bandwidth as more people start to use the site.

I use Google Cloud to deliver the games over a content delivery network for fast speeds whether gamers live in Dallas, Denmark or Dubai.

I’m one of the little people. A guy with a cool idea that put my savings on the line to pursue a cool idea. Living in San Francisco for six months on just a savings account is pretty difficult to do, but lucky for me, server costs are relatively cheap.

To build an audience I need to be wary of short term money grabs like plastering ads all over the site. So essentially I’m running at a complete loss for awhile as I work out monetization. As the site gains more traction I anticipate delivering petabytes of data which will be costly.

If net neutrality goes away, there are the two things that I could see happening. The one everybody talks about is tiered internet service:

I actually don’t think this is likely to happen. I think there would be too much consumer backlash. My guess is that ISP’s will tell cloud hosting providers like Google Cloud or AWS, “hey, we’ll allow you to send data to our clients, at tiered speeds”. And then the cloud hosting providers would pass the costs on to us, the webdev community.

Here’s how I imagine the Cloudfront CDN pricing table to look:

I’m lucky enough to live in an area with an “indy” ISP, Monkeybrains, who believes in net neutrality. But in many markets, ISP’s like Comcast and Time Warner have a monopoly or near monopoly.

While it doesn’t make sense to have ten ISP’s running cables all over town, it does make sense for natural monopolies like cable and power to be highly regulated by the government.

If the net neutrality repeal goes through, it is likely to damage or even destroy my small business. If ISP’s pass tiered costs to consumers, many will choose the cheapest option… that probably won’t include fast access to independent sites like mine. If they pass the tiered costs to cloud providers, I also lose with potentially unbearable hosting costs.

So this is not just about paying more for 4K video on Netflix. It’s about stifling innovation and making it much more difficult for “the little people” like myself to create innovative experiences on the internet.

If you liked this article I’d love a 👏! Or follow me on twitter or medium so that more people can see it. And help save the internet here.

If you’re on a desktop browser, give Mutant Snake by Nannings Games a try:

Shhhhh… Medium game embeds are a secret feature that I haven’t publicized yet.

How repealing net-neutrality could destroy my small business was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Na Na Na Na Hey Hey-ey Goodbye. Some celebration toons!

Techcrunch reports today that Adobe Flash is finally coming to an end.

In honor of the end of Adobe Flash, I will be listening to these all day!

Goodbye Strongbad, We’ll miss you.

But I won’t miss proprietary technology on the web so…

Steve Jobs didn’t believe in Flash:

And neither do I.

I believe in these two technologies:

They’re open and free.

Find me at preview.simmerindustries.com.

In Honor of the End of Flash was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has all the details about my new website, SIMMER industries (update: it’s now SIMMER.io), a place for Unity Developers to upload their content in WebGL format.

The Asset Store Link

I’ve done some informal surveying of developers who sell assets on the Unity Asset Store. The folks who had a link to a web demo claimed that it increased their sales rates significantly.

So, there’s a prominent backlink to the Asset Store that will hopefully help increase sales.

Share

To increase the viral nature, of your content, I’ve added share buttons. The social networks displayed are tailored to the visitor that arrives at your page.

Embed

What if you want your content to be viewed somewhere other than simmerindustries.com? Like a Wordpress blog or a personal website?

Simply click the embed button:

That will give you a custom HTML snippet for embedding:

Full Screen

Games can be a drag to play in a tiny window, and that’s why we’ve provided a Full Screen button

Note that on some large screens 4K, etc, that full screen can be a performance hog. I’m looking into solutions like automatic pixel doubling for this.

Description and Comments

Below your game or demo, there’s a description that you can provide, as well as a place for the community to discuss your asset.

Commenters can log in to the comments section with Facebook, Twitter or Google.

Uploading

How to Upload

If you want your own game asset or demo to be featured on SIMMER, simply click the upload button in the top right of the screen.

This will take you through a step-by-step wizard that will help get your asset to us.

Once we have your asset we’ll review, build, and post the asset, usually within 24 hours.

Automated Uploads

The SIMMER Export Plugin for Unity is actively in development, and will allow you to upload your game or demo directly from Unity to SIMMER.

I’m hoping to have the automated tool ready by mid August!