Kalzumeus Software

It seems that when I was a good web citizen and made all my pages nice and standards compliant via liberal use of DOCTYPE I apparently instructed IE to please ignore my CSS settings (come again?!  HTML 4.01 Transitional *should* understand the margin: auto construction).  I can fix it when I get home by changing the DOCTYPE into something else, unfortunately, the bloody page validators will complain unless I both fix the DOCTYPE into say XHTML 1.something *and* self-close all my meta and image tags.

Grr, grr, and grr…

… looks like his keygen doesn’t work :)

I just noticed that my page looks totally borked in IE — instead of being nice and centered its clumped at the left hand portion of the screen.  I’m clueless as to what is causing this since it worked fine a week ago.  Firefox is, as usual, not effected.  I guess I’ll have to hack around at it some more.  If any of you folks use IE on a regular basis do me a favor and drop by www.bingocardcreator.com and tell me if the content looks properly centered to you or not.

So an update on the hacker situation: my software got cracked yesterday by a Chinese warez group.  (They even went to the trouble of translating some of my marketing material into simplified Chinese — thanks guys, I think…)  I’m not super worried about the effect this will have on the success of this project, but its really annoying to have my highest traffic day ever as a result of a steady stream of traffic from their website.  If I had a .htaccess file available I’d redirect them to some choice comments* but, alas, I’m on Windows hosting and have no clue how to do that without borking something.

* I’d have to ask my little brother the Chinese diplomacy beast how to actually make choice comments in Chinese, but I suppose redirecting their requests for my executable to something which had the Japanese flag as a splash screen and all the buttons replaced by “Falun Gong Forever!” would cause the desired level of consternation.

I’ve been hacked.  :)

I’ve not accomplished anything major this weekend (working on some expanded Wizard functionality for math classes so I can start pitching the product to people not teaching reading) but there were one or two minor niggles with my program and website that I wanted to fix.  The first was inconsistency in Wizard naming — some levels had Dolch Word Lists and some had Dolch Sight Words, etc.  While inconsistency is fine for the website (got to catch search engine synonyms) I wanted the UI to look a wee bit more professional (it should also be sorted, which I’ll have to do later — currently the wizards end up alpha-sorted by filename instead of logically sorted by progression, so you end up with First Grade before Pre-Primer).

Here’s the other thing I just figured out: my links do not look like links, because they are not underlined.  I can’t believe that I’ve missed that for the entire time I’ve been working on my website.  I’m going to dive into the CSS later today and fix that.  Normally I would have scorned the idea that it would make a really big difference, but I’m seeing the clickstream data, and its not encouraging — many many people trying to get to the free trial, for example, click the Free Trial tab and then click it *again*.  That could be a double-click gone awry, except most of the other tabs don’t suffer this problem.  I doubled my downloads in a day by putting up those buttons — making the links scream “I’m a link!” can’t possibly hurt.

Sales: $24.95 (of which Paypal keeps $1.02)

Subtotal: $23.93

Expenses:

$6 — eBay listing fees.  Thinking I’m going to stop here.  People on eBay are just not willing to pay any price I’m willing to charge (I get 20+ views per auction but no sales).

$10.02 — website through GoDaddy, billed for first two months (and a year of the domain).

~$15 — international fax to get legal documents to eSellerate

$5 — minimum signup to use Yahoo’s sponsored search thing (I got a $25 credit for signing up).  After the credit has elapsed I’m thinking of canceling — I just can’t stand them next to Google and their performance compared with Google sucks.

$30 — my expected first month expense of working with Google, which drives probably 50% of my trial downloads.

Subtotal: $66.02
Hours worked: I estimate I’ve put about 5 hours in in the last week, so we’re somewhere in the vicinity of 50 total.

On a weekend.  That was quite unexpected (I had almost turned off my ads for the weekend on the assumption they would not lead to money).  For full price, from my website.  Unfortunately, a misconfiguration kept Google from recording it as a conversion (so I’m not sure exactly how this particular customer found me), but I get paid just the same.
For those keeping track, thats two weeks and a day after launch.  At the moment (with a free Payloadz account until I get, hmm, 3 more sales), that means I clear 24.95 – 1.02 (paypal fees) = $23.93 profit.  Thats about 80% of my advertising budget for my first month, which is now half completed.

I got my eSellerate account approved a few days ago and haven’t gotten around to actually setting it up for the website yet.  That will be one of my priorities for this weekend.  The actual mechanics of getting the product up and running are smooth as silk, and I estimate that I have played around with them for about 4-5 hours and could get a product listed in under 30 minutes if I really wanted to, start to finish.  The main difficulty is skinning the site to make it look and feel like your website.

My one complain about eSellerate — the number of pages you have to click through just screams “Abandon this software purchase!”.  The lowest I’ve been able to force it to is about 5 steps.  Yeah, egads.

I just got a customer who needed a particular feature which Bingo Card Creator doesn’t support (she wanted to be able to write something other than BINGO on top of the cards — note that I’m not even finished with code to write BINGO, although that is scheduled for the next version).  Unfortunately, she needed it by (literally) tomorrow, so I wasn’t able to help her.

I ended up pointing her to one of my competitor’s products which appears to have the feature she needs (I even installed their trial to make sure, and it appears it will work for her).  This makes me happy-sad: happy I was able to give her at least an option, very sad it wasn’t me.