As of today, the Looble Network is no more! We’ve decided that in order to better serve our growing audience of fans we must focus on our strengths and continue to build in that direction. We’ve therefore decided to re-name ourselves from “The Looble Network” to “LOOBLE”!

After conducting several surveys it was discovered that many of our daily visitors were visiting our websites with no socks on! We found this strange so decided to look into the matter further. What we discovered was that our websites rock so much that they were actually knocking people right out of their socks! That’s why we felt an all capitalized name like LOOBLE would be more descriptive of the services we offer!

We also decided to take advantage of our new found ability to knock people out of their socks by making it our new LOOBLE slogan! We rock your socks! Some of the cooler folks have been writing it as, “we rox ur sox”, but alas I digress.

We decided to knock out the network part as well because most of our success has come from game development (Battle City) rather than web development. Instead of working on building a community of websites and helping others setup their own sites, we will shift focus to game and software development. Our core websites like Software Engineer Training and Open Game Development will continue to be updated since they serve as resources that chronicle the things we learn as we develop our games and software. Some of our other websites will go up for sale so you might have the opportunity to get your hands on a sock rockin’ website!

Thank you everyone who has been visiting LOOBLE! We could not have rocked your socks without you! Hope to see you again soon, and bring some sandals!

Spungesoft.com is officially back in business after originally being shut-down by the Looble Network in October 2004. For those worried that history will repeat itself, we assure you that Herky is being kept far away from Spungesoft after he single-handedly drove the site into the ground four years ago! For those interested in the history of Spungesoft and the reasons for the shut-down, read about it here in our archives.

Spungesoft will now serve as a repository for random software research and troubleshooting. It will be run by a group of mad scientists operating out of the basement of Looble Headquarters.

After a period of rapid expansion in 2007, the Looble Network closed applications for new websites wishing to join so that the focus could be shifted instead to building quality content on each of the sites. This definitely payed off as the final end of year numbers are quite impressive:

Over the course of 2007 the Looble Network generated 357,246 page views from 64,189 visits!

The surprisingly high pages per visit of ~5.6 is in large due to the BattleCity Classic community and their very active forums!

With the monthly page views average approaching 30,000 it may soon be time for the Looble Network to start accepting new advertising partners. Network-wide advertising has been closed since the start of 2007 when the focus was shifted to building quality content such that advertisers would gain real value through partnerships with Looble.

“We want to offer high-quality advertising opportunities to our partners so that they continue to come back to our Network each time they run a new marketing campaign.”

The Looble Network experienced significant growth in 2007 thanks to the great content available on all of the websites. The following are the 5 websites which generated the most page views in 2007!

1. BattleCity Classic - The BattleCity Classic website managed to generate over 300,000 page views in 2007! If you factor in that the entire Looble Network generated about 360,000 page views last year, you can see why BattleCity is ranked #1!
2. Tamra Maew - Tamra Maew has quickly climbed the mountain to earn the #2 rank. Despite generating less traffic than BattleCity, Tamra managed to be ranked as the highest page on the Looble Network in November according to Google Webmaster Tools, being the first site ever to surpass BattleCity! This is because so many people love linking to Tamra’s site!
3. Free Games Center - Free Games Center has been growing slowly but surely since it first joined the Network. It’s a great resource for those interested in finding game related news.
4. Software Engineer Training - This website has been generating a significant amount of traffic, not thanks to incoming links, but thanks to search engines sending lots of visitors looking for very specific keywords. As content continues to be added to Software Engineer Training, it has the potential to grow significantly!
5. Flogger - Despite lacking updates towards the end of the year, Flogger managed to hold on to the #5 spot thanks to significant amounts of people searching for Stephen Colbert, roadside urination and of course cows.

Ah, what a journey it has been so far attempting to complete our quest of climbing into the top 100,000 websites on Alexa!

First, on August 21, 2007, Alexa Ranked the Looble Network at 965,925! This was right at the start of the quest, when for the first time ever, the Looble Network broke past the 1 milliion mark! Awesome!

Breaking into the top 1 million was news well received by our Looble community! After our announcement, many people who visit our Network Websites decided to show their support for Looble by downloading the Alexa Toolbar.  The results definitely showed and we thank everybody who helped out! On September 28, 2007, just one month later, Alexa was ranking the Looble Network at 328,646!

The best part is, having our community download the Alexa Toolbar is not cheating in any way! It’s actually just making our Alexa ranking more accurate, because now more of our visitors are being counted! It’s still up to us to work hard at making sure we provide the content to keep them coming back!

It’s now November 26, 2007.  At this time our Alexa rank is now 183,578! We haven’t quite broken into the top 100,000 yet, but we’ve sure gotten a lot closer! Thanks again to everyone visiting and enjoying the sites in our network!

If you haven’t already done so, please download the Alexa Toolbar!

One year ago, after a near shut-down of BattleCity, the Looble Network and Codemallet officially joined forces in attempt to bring a more stable and successful future to the game. Last week, Codemallet decided to drop out of this partnership in order to focus on other game development projects, leaving the Looble Network with full-rights to the game.

We plan to keep on hosting and developing BattleCity Classic and would like to apologize to all the players who were forced to endure a week of down-time when the server was closed unexpectedly! We’re also still waiting for Codemallet to fulfill it’s end of the partnership agreement and send us the latest version of the game as well as our share of profits raised over the last year so that we can invest this money into a new server!

If you’re having trouble getting online to play BattleCity Classic right now please download the latest version! The game is back up and running!

What is RSS?

RSS is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites. RSS allows users to receive the latest posts from all of their favorite websites in one place.

How to Use RSS

Get an RSS Reader - If you’d like to receive updates from all of your favorite websites via RSS you will need an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many free feed readers available online. Two of the most popular web-based feed readers are Google Reader and Bloglines. Both are fairly easy to use and will automatically retrieve the latest news from all of your favorite websites for you.

Feed readers work a lot like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll receive new entries in your reader from the sites you’re tracking. These entries will be marked as read or unread just like with email. When viewing entries you’ll have the option to read them directly in the feed reader or the option to view them on the the actual website they originate from.

Don’t want to Use an RSS Reader? Email is an Option

If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated for you then please don’t worry. Many sites also enable you to subscribe to RSS feeds via a more familiar medium - Email.

Unsubscribe at Any Time

With RSS Feed Readers or Email subscriptions you are in full control of the content you wish to view. You can unsubscribe from a feed any time you want.

Suggested Feeds

Here are some feeds we recommend you subscribe to:

BattleCity Classic

Software Engineer Training

Flogger

Tamra Maew

Software Engineer Training is the latest website to join the Looble Network! The site hopes to grow into a great educational resource for aspiring engineers by providing knowledge, tools, and methods for defining requirements and performing design, implementation, testing and maintenance.

The site plans to cover a wide-array of topics valuable to software engineers such as project management, requirements gathering and analysis, software design and programming, networking, security, computer architecture and much more! If any of these topics interest you, be sure to pay Software-Engineer-Training.com a visit!

On August 21, just one month ago, we proudly announced that for the first time ever Alexa ranked the Looble Network among the top million websites online! At the time of that post, Alexa was ranking the Looble Network at 965, 925! We declared right there and then that our ultimate goal was to break into the top 100,000!

We haven’t reached our goal yet, but we are extremely pleased to announce that we are moving in the right direction! It’s only one month later and the Looble Network has already seen a significant ranking improvement! Alexa is now ranking us at 328, 646!

Thank you everyone who has been visiting our websites!

Check out the following two websites that the Looble Network has decided to put up for sale!

• CareyPrice.net
• FeedRankings.com

Carey Price is a first round draft pick of the Montreal Canadiens NHL team. He is expected to be a future superstar and the domain we are selling is guaranteed to bring tons of traffic to anybody using it to make a fan site!

Feed Rankings would be the perfect site for anyone ranking RSS feeds or even different types of cow food!