Kalzumeus Software

My year of GoDaddy hosting, which cost me about $93 if I recall correctly, expires on February 23rd.  I will be transitioning Bingo Card Creator from GoDaddy hosting to one of my Slicehost VPSes slightly before that happens.

This is not a rejection of GoDaddy so much as it is just a natural growth in where the site is going.  I am integrating the Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Card sites, and am planning on doing some serious Rails-based work on the main site itself, starting with some backend improvements (conversion tracking the way Google should be doing it, for starters — “first click wins” not “last click wins”) and a few automated marketing experiments.  As a result, I have no further need for shared hosting, and want my $7 a month back.  ;)

One thing that gave me pause about doing this was an email disruption.  Happily, I was able to transfer email providing from GoDaddy to Google Apps for Domains without much hassle.  It took about 20 minutes to set up, all told.  Now I get to use the Gmail interface I know and (mostly) love with my @bingocardcreator.com addresses.  Hopefully Google will also end improve the deliverability of the emails, although since setting up an SPF record for my site and e-junkie I have had much, much less of a problem with that. 

Another thing which I’ll have to think about is whether my $20 a month Slicehost slice can take an increase in traffic by a factor of about 10 (immediately) and then some fairly rapid growth after Google gives Bingo Card Creator’s link juice and domain trust to the Daily Bingo Card cards.  I’m pretty sure it can, but will be serving key pages as static HTML until I know that traffic spikes won’t bring the whole business to its knees.

Sidenote: for those starting uISVs looking for hosting, I think GoDaddy is an excellent choice.  I think in 18 months there I’ve had one serious problem (unexplained corruption of the trial executable EXE, on and off, for two weeks) and one additional minor outage, which happened in the middle of the night and lasted for a few minutes.

… but not quite released yet.  I finally figured out what was giving Java problems with reading the 200 new bingo card files (stupid Windows Notepad inserting a byte order mark into UTF8 text, stupid Java not reading BOMs in UTF8 despite them being in the standard, stupid me for letting this delay a release by almost a month…)

I’ll be releasing it into the wild as soon as the site redesign is complete — ideally, sometime this weekend.  In the meanwhile, I’ve already put it on Daily Bingo Cards as sort of an early-warning-system for issues.  For once, I rather doubt there will be any.  If there were, my new and improved automated test suite would have croaked when doing the output run for all the DBC cards.

New in 2.0

• ~200 new bingo card Wizards
• better support for foreign character sets
• much, much better printing for many large words and phrases
• assorted bugsquashing
• eased some trial restrictions that were only causing problems as opposed to sales

In the crazy busyness of January I forgot about pre-announcing the price increase, so I’m going to put that off for another month.

I will post more about this topic in the future, but one of the reasons to have a blog is that it allows you to establish a reputation as an expert in your field. Having that reputation leads to all sorts of doors opening up for you — for example, if I weren’t blogging and otherwise creating useful content, it would be fairly unlikely that the CEO of Dzone (a social networking startup for programmers) would drop me an email and ask to please repost my linkbait to his site.

(Which is, incidentally, about as nice a success as you could ask for linkbait. Some people might be disinclined to go that route, preferring to keep control. I am more inclined to pick ability to spread over control — after all, you will still get credit as the original source, and you can think of it as investing in the success of your next project.)

The linkbait in question was my SEO on Rails post, which recently got a bit of new life breathed into it months after its original production by some light promotion on the social networking services. (If I can pound the same old drum one more time, if you’re going to invest time in creating content you might as well make the content evergreen — that post will still be good in 3 years, assuming Rails doesn’t decide to fall off the radar screen.) There is little reason to read it again if you’ve already read it, but they convinced me to put a photo up, which some folks might find interesting.

I have resisted putting up a photo on my blog for the last two years for one reason: I have had a (somewhat irrational) fear of getting judged by my age. I’m 25, incidentally.

I am going to try to write one of my longer, meatier pieces in the next week (it is SEO/information architecture related, and should be of interest to those uISVs who have hundreds of pages rather than the typical 5 page brochure site), and after that I don’t have a strong idea for a topic to cover yet.  I thought I would ask you guys: what do you want to see covered here?  I’m in principle open to writing about almost anything within my capabilities, and quite a bit of the stuff outside of them, too. ;)

I’m hiring again, on a project unrelated to the last two.

Details are on eLance — I needed a bit more robust response to this offer than I got the last time I advertised a web design job here, but that is likely because my timing was poor and my blog has been dead for a while.  It took me forever and a day to figure out how to get a simple permalink out of them, but eventually I abused their “mail description to a friend feature” to do so.  Here are the details.

In a nutshell:

I’m going to need someone to make a 1 page template to cover a merge of Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Cards.  DBC has been fairly successful and I want to fold its pages into Bingo Card Creator, which will provide Bingo Card Creator with some badly needed updated content on a daily basis and will allow me to use the much, much higher link juice pointing at BCC to rank DBC’s cards.  None of this specifically requires me to have a new design, naturally, but I figured as long as I was going to have to edit every page on a website might as well use the opporunity to make it look pretty.  And I’ve got some revenues around from January to do it with.

Details:

• The market is overwhelmingly female, 30-40s, and non-technical.  The design needs to be bright, clean, and inviting to this audience.  I like Web 2.0 aesthetics, such as you’d find at CrazyEgg, BlinkSale, or the like.
• The basic layout of the page isn’t changing much: header, horizontal navigational categories, sidebar moves to left, main content area.  The main content area is divided up into sections (similar to the current Bingo Card Creator home page).
• The main content area should take up most of the space on the page, similar to how it does currently. 
• Target for 1024×768 resolution. 
• The design will have to showcase black and white bingo cards, of substantially similar appearance (including size) to the ones currently on Daily Bingo Cards.
• New buttons for the free trial and purchasing links, as well as any others you feel are appropriate.
• You’ve got a free hand to use or ignore any previous icons/banners/etc.  I am paying for your visual and design expertise, so do what you think is best.  It is my personal opinion that the current banner is too large.
• I really, really hate stock photos of random people.  No visual element can suggest that Bingo Card Creator is related to gambling in any way — bingo balls, etc, are out.

You can send a bid and portfolio to (my first name)@bingocardcreator.com or you can respond through eLance, whichever you are comfortable with.  I’m thinking in the general vicinity of $300 – $500 and completion in under two weeks from project acceptance.  (I am fairly responsive with change requests, and don’t imagine there will be that many.)  As usual, I don’t particularly care who you are, where you live, etc — if you can follow instructions well enough to get the job done that is good enough for me.

Saw this on Carsonified a minute ago:

Google released a new version of Analytics which requires you to update your script and, in return, gives you a lot of goodies.  (You can keep the old one if you don’t want the goodies.  It will continue working for at least another year, but will receive no new updates, aside from (presumably) security fixes.)

New features of particular note to the ISV:

• Track downloads and, with a little work, download completions and download times (free link to whoever figures out the best way to do this first, it is 2 AM and I am not doing Javascript at this hour)
• Tracking access to dynamic content — Flash objects, Javascript/AJAXy elements/etc, embedded videos
• Track e-commerce conversions better (here’s hoping it works this time)
• New reports are getting rolled out which won’t be compatible with the old way.

Fair warning: a quick perusal of the PDF integration guide suggests that this is slightly more pain than Analytics used to be.  Nothing to be worried about if you’re a programmer, but I will be handling this project myself for my brother’s superhero novel blog.  This doesn’t require Peter Parker levels of scientific accumen but it isn’t a Hulk Smash Puny Variable project, either.

My little brother just had his first successful piece of linkbait hit it big: List of Superhero Powers.  It got farked and then so did the VPS I was hosting his blog on.  I have spent the last hour fighting with the configuration so that it can withstand a traffic graph that looks something like a standing wave.  It seems to be stable now, thankfully. 

Sidenote to anyone who thinks playing amateur server admin in crisis mode is a good idea: put your Apache config files in version control because if you bork your redirection code and don’t remember how you got it working the first time you will be sorry.

I was doing one of my periodic searches for backlinks and found an archive of a mailing list where some folks (including at least one customer) were talking about new ideas in teaching reading for the next year.  One person pointed to my page and gushed enthusiastically. 

(I won’t link to it because, hey, they deserve their privacy — it is quite possible they don’t know their words are being archived and almost certain that they don’t know folks are searching for them as we speak.  Awareness of how much Google does to upend the expectation of privacy hasn’t quite seeped in yet.)

Anyhow, while I certainly won’t say no to the nice little side income and intellectual challenge Bingo Card Creator brings me, I’m most happy when folks mention how psyched they are about using it to teach their kids.

Hideho again everybody.  Based on the stunning success of my last call for freelancers, I decided to do this here rather than wasting time and money going through one of the freelancer sites.

What I need done: I want someone to take the basic template for www.dailybingocards.com (the one for each individual card) and reskin it so that the layout is roughly the same but the overall color and scheme theme is different.  I’ll tell the specifications of the theme to the designer I end up selecting.  This will involve skinning the top banner and all graphics (except the card, naturally) to match the new theme.  Design to be done in HTML, and you can grab any of the existing structure as a base if you want.

Why I need this done: I have a linkbait idea.  It involves bingo cards and is highly topical.  After you get the theme done, I’m going to integrate it with a bit of Rails and some content that I’ll develop, and then launch it.  And, mark my words, this is going to spread.

How much work is this: I’m anticipating this is under an hour or two of work to a decently talented designer.  I’m not doing it myself because, let’s face it, my design and visual skills suck.

What do you get paid: $100, payable via your choice of either check delivered in the US or Paypal.  I’ll also pay for the expenses for any stock photos needed, within reason.  I estimate it takes about 2 weeks for the check to arrive and Paypal would be pretty close to immediate.

How you can be sure I pay: If you’re reading this blog, presumably you have trust in me already.  Anyhow, the last time I hired a bunch of freelancers this way, I paid out as expected and was pretty generous with the bonuses.  References upon request.

Bonus: You can include a link to yourself in the footer.  If I do any decent job promoting this concept, and I’ve got high hopes, that will be a fairly valuable link and your design will be seen by, conservatively, tens of thousands of people.  No, I will not let you use the link to sell Viagra or mortgages.

Any restrictions: Work has to be done new for this project.  I don’t really care where you live and what language you grew up speaking as long as you can follow directions.  However, there is one significant requirement here which will be obvious once I tell you what the theme is that is going to favor Americans and others who have a good understanding of American culture.  I’m not saying you have to be American, but it will help you complete the job quickly.

The usual legal disclaimers: You are acting as an independent contractor and represent that you have the legal permission to work wherever you’re working from.  After I pay you, the design and other deliverables (images, etc) are mine.  (I’ll let you keep a copy around for your portfolio.)  I’ll be blogging about this project after it is launched, and if you want I’ll mention that the visual part of it was created by you.

How do I apply: I expect to get many folks interested in this opportunity, and will choose on the basis of caprice, any previously existing reasons I have to trust you, and your portfolio.  It would be a good idea to submit a few links with your e-mail.  The general visual style is a bit Web 2.0ish and a bit on the American-as-apple-pie.  Shoot me an email at my-first-name@bingocardcreator.com if you’re interested.  Feel free to pass this offer along to anyone you think might be interested. 

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie

Hideho everybody, and welcome to 2008.  If you’re still reading this after me taking nearly a month off to crunch at work and visit my family, I owe you a double-plus helping of good wishes for the new year.  So, let’s see, what is up for Bingo Card Creator and this blog in January:

1)  Bingo Card Creator 2.0 will be officially released sometime this weekend.  The major improvements include a tweak in the printing code which has resulted in making most cards much more readable and the addition of close to 200 extra word lists to the product, derived from the Daily Bingo Cards project.  As they say: if you’ve got it, flaunt it. 

2)  I am also increasing prices at that point, although the Back to School sale will take the edge off of them.

3)  I know I have said this before, but the big announcement with Google should actually happen next week.  (I just tell you what they tell me.)  You can keep an eye peeled here or you can keep an eye peeled at the AdWords blog, as I’ve been informed they’ll be cross-posting the announcement there.

4)  I have one of those meaty blog articles in the works about competitors.  The short version: I recommend having them, but mostly ignoring them.  It will be posted here when it is ready.  I’m also working on a longer elaboration of my remarks about choosing a name for your product/uISV.

5)  I’d post more, except there is a bonnie lass who I haven’t seen in a few weeks as a result of going back to America.  Sorry, gents, but I have my priorities in order.