Finding What You Need, Fast!

There are so many fantastic files added to Flashden each and every day that it can sometimes be difficult to find what you are looking for. Furthermore, it may be that you cannot locate what has recently been added. But fear not! This article will not only help you understand a little more about how Flashden organizes all of our content (and how users navigate it), but hopefully you will discover some cool tips you can use to get to what you want, faster!

The Flashden home page is the perfect and most obvious place to begin. Whether or not you are logged in or out, the home page features some great ways to see what’s new.

Homepage > Recent

The “Recent” tab in our “Start Browsing” section at the bottom of the home page randomly displays 21 out of the 100 most recently added files. This is a great way to get an overview of new content on Flashden. There are a couple of new rules associated with this section, which are: Recent files are only shown from authors who sell their files exclusively on Flashden. So it pays to be an exclusive author for your favorite stock Flash site! That said, we understand this may not be fair to new users, which is why we apply another rule: New users who have sold less than $500 worth of files (i.e. they are not yet eligible to become exclusive) also have the opportunity of having their new files appear on the home page randomly.

Homepage > Popular

The next way of perusing files is via the “Popular” tab in the “Start Browsing” section. This section shows 14 of the hottest, most wanted items on Flashden, and popularity is measured by total sales from the previous week. Clicking on the “View More Popular Items” button will take you to a dedicated page of top selling items. Here you can see twice as many popular files (28 in total) from the previous week, as well as a list of popular files from the previous month, and a section where authors battle it out to see who can sell most files in one month. You might see some familiar names in this section!

Homepage > Search

Adjacent to the “Recent” and “Popular” tabs is our trusty friend the search engine! Not only can you search for files by keyword(s), but there are also some options to search for specific file types, users, and even forum posts! Does it now make sense why we always ask you to provide “tags” whenever you upload new content?

Homepage > File Type (Flash, Video, Audio, Fonts)

One of the simplest yet most effective ways to search for new content on Flashden is by using the category buttons in the left navigation menu, right beneath the Flashden logo. If you click on “Flash” for example, a paginated list of all Flash files is listed, ordered by most recently added. What’s great about this page is that you can also re-order everything however you want! You can re-sort all files by Author name, file size (we call this “Published size”), resolution, and price. You can even sort the files by Rating which is the total number of votes cast by file purchasers. Probably the most exciting category however is Sales, which will order all our Flash files by total number of sales. Take a look and see where all your files rank!

Files > Browse Categories

http://www.flashden.net/category/index

Think of the “Browse Categories” Web page as the Flashden sitemap. It’s everything you could ever want to find, organized by category. So if you’re looking for some Chill-Out tunes, you can quickly navigate to the Audio > Chill-Out page, or if you want to compare and contrast all the creative / portfolio Flash Web site templates, Site Templates > Creative / Portfolio is the place to go. There are currently over 70 categories across all file types! Talk about being organized!

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are one of the best kept secrets on Flashden! RSS is also one of the best ways to keep informed about new content on Flashden. Not only do we have RSS feeds for all items sold on Flashden, but each author has their very own RSS feed too, so you can keep track of your own files or keep on eye on all your favorite Flashden contributors! Here’s a list of some RSS feed examples that you can use with your favorite RSS reader, such as Google Reader:

Site-wide RSS feed of new files:
http://www.flashden.net/feeds/new-flash-items.atom

An example of an individual’s RSS feed (replace “collis” with your own username):
http://www.flashden.net/feeds/users/collis.atom

There’s even an RSS feed for any comments made on your own files (replace “bobocel” with your own username)!
http://activeden.net/feeds/user_item_comments/bobocel.atom

Files > Featured Authors / Files

Finally, Flashden also has a dedicated section for featured files and a featured author which is updated once per week. This section gives exposure to authors and content that really catches our eye and is our way of saying “thank you!” to the very special and unique community we are privileged to have at Flashden. You can navigate to this section from the home page either through the section called “The Community” on the right side of the home page, or via Files > Featured Authors / Files in our left navigation menu.

Phew! That’s a lot of different ways to navigate Flashden to find what you are looking for. As a special bonus for those of you who have read this entire blog post, we can also reveal that we will be featuring a lot more files and a lot more authors in a lot more depth on our blog, so stay tuned! You never know, you may be the subject of our next blog post!