One interesting corner of HTML5 development is web-based games. With a few well placed canvases and a healthy does of Javascript, you can create just about any game you can dream. However, the complex nature of Javascript has created the need for a few companies to release game engines built entirely in Javascript and HTML5. This is where Pulse comes in.

Another year has come and gone, which means it's time for us to look back at 2011 and see what happened. This year marks the fifth anniversary of Switch On The Code and so far every year has been better than the last.

In February we saw our first ever month of 500k pageviews, and for the most part traffic has held steady ever since. We ended the year with an amazing 5.6 million pageviews - a 10% increase over the previous year.

HTML5 is pretty much the web 3.0 standard these days, and there are plenty of neat neat HTML5 tutorials out there to prove it. In fact, there are even a few game engines out there that are built for HTML5. A recent development in this area was the release of the Pulse developer preview. Here is a short demo of what is possible with pulse:

For the past few years Switch On The Code has been bringing you tutorials and news in the world of programming. Last week we expanded our repertoire to include video games by launching Avoid The Grind. We've assembled an excellent team of writers to bring you the best video game news, guides, reviews, and media.

For the last few years we've been using a dedicated server for all of our hosting needs, but recently we decided to choose something a little more flexible and extensible and Amazon's EC2 seemed like a perfect fit. Amazon offers a free micro instance for a year, so off we went - building our latest project. It wasn't until the server started getting a little use that we noticed something important - a micro instance could end up costing us a significant amount of money.

While not quite as exciting as Reddit's billions served announcement, Switch On The Code did pass a milestone we've been anxiously awaiting - 500,000 pageviews!

It appears as though our spam filter has been running amok marking anything and everything as spam. We noticed a definite drop in comment volume, but failed to find where our new spam filter was putting all the marked content. Well, we found it, and whereas I tried to release everything that wasn't spam, some things were left irretrievable.

If you've been attempting to comment these past few weeks, we apologize for the inability to do so. The spam system has been essentially disabled while we search for another alternative.

Hey everyone, we're still here and wanted to update our readers with something we changed here on the site. One thing we get a lot of here at Switch On The Code is spam, mostly comment spam on posts. This causes a couple issues, first is trying to put something in place to reduce the amount of manual work done to remove spam. On this front we have long used the hashcash module which has performed decently. It captures nearly all of the spam comments we were getting but has a problem stopping legitimate people from posting comments.

As we sat down today to do some performance profiling in Shark, we came to a sudden realization - it doesn't work anymore with iOS4. After some quick Google searching I came across a thread in Apple's developer forum (registration required) that indicated there were no plans to bring iOS4 support to Shark.

So over the last couple years here at Switch On The Code we built up from a very small following to a pretty decent sized web site. Also, over that time frame we have done a few different things with our advertising, to varying degrees of success. Well, we decided it was time to try something new with some of our ads. Specifically, the 125x125 ads on our post pages. We recently moved all of these over to Buy Sell Ads.