Kalzumeus Software

About two weeks ago Andy Brice got in touch with me about throwing some blogging support behind a programmer-focused charity drive he started this year. I thought, hey, why stop at blogging — it would probably work better with a dedicated website, some linkbait, a little Flickr integration, and the like.  So we put our heads together and came up with something — not bad for two guys who have never met and live about 9 time zones away from each other, eh?

(You know, in the annals of offshoring, this may well be the first time somebody from the UK “hired” an American in Japan on the behalf of “clients” in India.)

Programmer T-shirts is now open for business charity.  I’ve also posted a fairly substantial essay on how both open source software and the principles animating it can be helpful to charity, which will hopefully be a hit with the Slashdot set.  That essay includes tips at the bottom on how you can help out, both monetarily and by giving generously of your time and/or attention, the non-monetary alternate currencies of the Internet.  

Merry Christmas!

Andy Brice, man of many talents, is putting together a Christmas drive to make t-shirts for programmers and donate the proceeds to charity. Sounds like a swell idea — particularly the donating to charity bit, as my office will let me wear a T-shirt the day after I get elected Prime Minister of Japan.

Who Benefits:

Jaipur Foot: A charitable foundation which provides support to the disabled and needy in India, including by providing low-cost prosthetics.  

Sightsavers: A charitable foundation which provides surgery and other medical care to people at risk of losing their eyesight due to mostly easily treatable conditions.

What You Can Do To Help Out:

1)  Buy a T-shirt, naturally.  I like “Be Nice: I have a blog” personally.  

2)  Help spread the word about Andy’s charitable drive.

3)  Donate to the charities directly (links are available on their websites, mentioned above).

What I’ll Do To Help You Help Out:

Take a picture of yourself wearing one of Andy’s T-shirts.  Alternatively, if you just straight out donated, take a picture holding a sign with a funny programming joke.  (Or something which would approximate funny if programmers had a sense of humor.  I suggest “I’m in your world debugging your illnesses!”)  

Inform me of the photo in some manner — comment, trackback, email, skywrite your TinyURL over central Japan, whatever.  For every person who does so by Christmas, I’ll chip in $30 direct to the charities.  (We’ll set a sensible limit for the matching grant at, say, the first ten folks who take me up on it.)

Because We Wouldn’t Be Programmers Without An API Call:

What It Lacks In Subtlety It Makes Up For In Lack Of Subtlety!

Every year around Christmas time, I get literally thousands of requests for Christmas bingo cards.  I decided to do something a little special this Christmas and throw up a website about them — so if you want your Christmas bingo game, you can go there now.  

If you aren’t a small businessman, there is likely nothing else of interest in this blog post.  I suggest clicking on the above link to get your bingo cards.

If you’re a microISV, keep reading: this is an experiment.  For the last several months I have been particpating on Aaron Wall’s SEObook community forums, and he preaches the gospel of Exact Match Domain names as a tool for ranking sites quickly in Google and the like, even allowing them to cut past other older sites that have scads of links.  I have actually seen one of my competitors dip his toes into doing this, too — after I talked here many times about a particular keyword he registered keyword.org and now ranks #3.  Spiffy for him.

I get scads of traffic for all seasonal related bingo cards — if you remember my graph of different categories on my website, Holidays accounts for almost a quarter of cards downloaded by visitors.  The top few holidays account for the lion’s share of that — Halloween, in particular, is the reason October is invariably the best month of the year for me.   

So I decided, hmm, why not try an experiment this year and see if I could drive rankings for just a few head terms instead of doing my usual rank-for-everything-under-the-sun strategy (Crustaceans bingo, ho!)  That could involve getting a few dozen links to my site, but it is fairly difficult (though by no means impossible) to get people to link directly to a commercial site.  Instead, I thought, I’d make a mostly non-commercial mini-site focused like a freaking laser on giving people exactly what they wanted, and making it as easy to link to as humanly possible.

Step #1: Identify my keywords.  I already know them, in this case — the next big holiday which gives me suitable time to get ready is Christmas.  The #1 keyword is Christmas bingo cards.  I can look at my website logs and find 15 variations of that to play with.

Step #2: Buy the exact match domain.  Somebody had actually registered [Christmas bingo cards] before.  Oh well.  He was amenable for selling at the quite reasonable price of $149 — then I paid another $8 to move it to Godaddy, my registrar of choice.  (Is this reasonable?  Well, consider that I spend 25 cents to drive one download of Bingo Card Creator, or roughly $15 per sale, when I’m paying on AdWords.  I’ll spend more on AdWords this week alone than the domain cost me, and as of next week its like that money was never spent… but the domain stays up for years.

Step #3: Install WordPress.  You really can’t beat WordPress for making attractive, small sites with a minimum of time investment.  They don’t even have to necessarily look like blogs, if you choose your template well.

Step #4: Find an attractive template.  This is honestly one of the most important steps.  You’re creating a site to be the One Canonical Source On The Internet for your little subniche — it should look the part.  An attractive site makes it very easy for it to collect links from your customers saying “Hey, Ethyl, I just saw the best site on the Internet for Christmas bingo cards.  You should check it out.”  You can either outsource this to your favorite designer or use an OSS template.  Happily Smashing Magazine (a blog devoted to, hmm, beautiful things?) covered an absolutely outstanding Christmas wordpress theme last year.  It took me maybe 5 minutes with Stylizer to smooth some rough edges.  (Needs another 5 minutes for the sidebar in IE.)

Step #5: Supplement with pretty graphics.  Stock photography and stock icons make everything better.

Step #6: Write the content.  I wrote several blog posts and pages about the subject, in my usual voice.  This took more time than everything else put together, and it isn’t done yet — I eventually hope to have perhaps 5 or 10 pages on the site when it is ready.  Tips: You probably want to use WordPress to replace the front page with a Page rather than a listing of your most recent posts.  You also probably want to remove much of the blog-specific cruft, as the site will probably not be receiving year round regular updates so why lead people to expect that?  

Exactly what the content says is up to you.  I didn’t try to sell very hard at all — many of the folks who find this site are going to be parents, and parents don’t typically buy Bingo Card Creator.  But parents are quite capable of leaving links.  (Teachers, on the other hand, may decide to actually purchase BCC.)  Plus, because the site looks like the #1 destination on the Internet for christmas bingo cards (look at the design!  look at the domain name!  look at the Zen-like purity of purpose!), it should probably pick them up from authoritative sites as well.

Step #7: Make it scale.  If it works… why stop at one mini-site?

Hideho folks.  I’m taking a bit of a break from progress updates on the 30 Day Sprint (not progressing as much as I wanted to but I have Saturday blocked off with a designer buddy to get some stuff together) in order to answer a common question. 

I love e-junkie, the service.  So much so that I have been called Robin’s local sales rep.  And that is probably closer to the truth than I would like it to be.  But I really, really can’t stand the name — it says absolutely nothing positive to my customers about my business.  So I go to some pains to avoid them seeing it.  Since it will help other uISVs and e-junkie, I thought I’d give a rundown.

Issue: Customer lands on e-junkie page after checkout, to receive CD key

Resolution:

1)  Go to your e-junkie product settings. 

2)  Click the box next to “Product Requires: … Redirection”.

3)  Click Next.

4)  Fill in the Redirection URL.  Point it to a page on your own web server.

5)  On the page on your web server, you will want to display the CD key and instructions for installing it, plus regurgitating all the other stuff you put in your thank you mail.  (Make it big and bold because people do not read this page unless you give them a darn obvious reason to.  Getting them to read it saves you support costs, trust me.)  You can handle the content.  If e-junkie has a CD key, for example if you uploaded a list to them or they run a script to generate one for you, they’ll put the CD key in a URL variable “key”.  So if your URL was http://www.example.com/thanks.htm, your customer will end up seeing http://www.example.com/thanks.htm?something=here&somethingelse=here&key=yourkey .  Your mission is to get that key onto the displayable page.  If you can do server side programming, for example in PHP, this is pretty trivial.  If you can’t, you can grab it with a bit of Javascript. 

Either way, please secure your website against ye-olde insert-arbitrary-content-by-rewriting-the-URL trick.  You’ll thank me later.

Issue: Customer’s mail server is throwing out your mail

1)  e-junkie generated mail originates from one of (as of the last time I checked) three e-junkie.com servers.  It carries your name as the sender.  Bad news bears, this means that many automated checks on that email will say “e-junkie.com is spoofing honestmicroisv.com, oh no, its spaaaaam!”  What you need to do is publish an SPF record telling the world that e-junkie.com is a legitimate source of email for you.

2)  You’ll probably want to read the docs for your individual web hosting company on how to do an SPF record.  GoDaddy‘s interface is rather sweet.

Issue: You have links to www.e-junkie.com all over your page.

1)  You aren’t using the Fat Free Cart?  OK, fix that right now.  (And watch your conversion rise!)

2)  You might be worried about folks seeing the links by looking at their address bar really closely after clicking on the links.  Personally, I doubt my customers are nearly that savvy, but maybe yours are.  What you need to do is publish a CNAME DNS record, aliasing store.bingocardcreator.com (example) to www.e-junkie.com .  Then, every time the GoDaddy docs say e-junkie.com, you just subsitute your local alias.  This will not work with https (customers don’t know what that is, either) but it will get rid of the e-junkie.com in the URL bar in most browsers that I am aware of (some might resolve the CNAME and then update — I don’t know which off the top of my head), and it will get rid of the URL on hover in every browser.

And that is your tip for the day.  Check back this weekend, I’ll be back to coding and writing up a storm.

Don’t Wreck My PC.  While I personally really appreciate the ability to have keywords in program name, because it will be far and away the most common anchor text, for sheer brandability and selling the program, that name just rocks.  (Your program name is also your USP.  Sweet deal) 

I also love the logo — bright and colorful does great things in B2C.  Suggestion: skin the app so that it uses this same color pallete and general style for buttons & etc.  Oh crikey does that help conversions (by about 50% when I made my app look more Fisher Pricey).

Hideho everybody.  Its been about a month since I updated the blog, which as you’ve probably surmised means I’ve been pretty busy with real life.

Day Job — We have about 7 non-Japanese speaking Indians arriving from our sister office.  They’re here to learn Japanese business practices and be better able to lead our outsourcing efforts in India.  Given that I’m the only person at the English who speaks English and doesn’t answer to “Mr. President”, it looks like I’m going to end up being their manager one way or another, so I’ve been doing preparation for them so that they can both get some work done once they get here and enjoy their stay.

Bingo Card Creator — Answering emails and not a whole lot else.

Next Project — Doing some research.  Its a long, long way off at the moment.

Bonnie Lass — Going through some adjustments, particularly as she just started working.  I’m torn by a desire to be supportive when she says “I was grading homework until 6:30 last night!” and a desire to remind her that I’m a Japanese salaryman and that 6:30 is practically a day off.  (Speaking of which, did anyone see the NYT article about Japan having a shortage of engineers?  The NYT blames cultural factors and malaise.  I have a simpler explanation: there is no pay premium for engineering over a normal college degree, which means that the starting salary for a computer programmer is about $24,000, and you’re more or less required to work 12 hour days at a minimum.)

Hobby — The last several years I’ve seen my interest in video games declining, but Senjou no Varukyuria (Battlefield Valkyrie) has brought it right back.  Its difficult to describe… let me try: its World War II Europe in an alternate universe where the I-can’t-believe-its-not-Japan country that looks more like Holland has an army populated by bread bakers who moonlight as Norse goddess killing machines.  That is actually pretty close to normal for a Japanese game.  Despite the heaping helping of weird, the plot and characterization is better than anything I’ve ever seen in a game or movie (I was crying at one point), and it actually functions really well as a game.  (Its hard to describe — strategy RPG with FPS elements, whose boss fights resemble intricate ballet, with bullets being exchanged.)  Plus the entire thing looks like its hand-drawn in colored pencils despite being full, gorgeous 3D.  I promise you, you’ve never played anything like it.. 

So basically, when I get home at midnight and have two hours to kill before going to bed, its generally been here instead of the ISV.  But I’m on the last mission so things should be getting back to normal soon.

It was weird — while showing one of my coworkers the beauty of famfamfam icons for possible use in sprucing up one of our online applications, I mentioned that every time I see a good, pretty icon set I get the urge to make an application just to be able to use them.

“So why don’t you?”, he asks me.

And lately, I have not been able to come up with a good answer for that question.  I mean, work is killing me but I have enough time to waste it on browsing the Internet.  I certainly am not hurting for startup funds this time around, and I know what needs to be done to get a business up and running. 

So I’ve started kicking around some ideas.  Of course, I’m not exaggerating on work is killing me, so it will have to be something where I can see progress with a bunch of 2 hour mini-sprints after getting in the door around midnight.  That suggests it should probably be a web application.  Alas, Java, I knew ye well…

I have also been having persistent dreams of a particular application.  They’ve gotten so vivid as to include database schema…  but the waking me knows that the business model is terrible.  Just asking for total failure.  Nobody could ever pay money for it.  And yet, I would really want to see this get made…  We’ll see.

Further updates in the usual space.

Speaking of which, I haven’t been blogging much lately, part for lack of energy and part for lack of ideas.  I have been considering doing some severe surgery to the blog to collect much of the information in a more permanent, sensible manner — so that you could, say, click on a category listing for SEO and then get material about that in an organized order rather than just seeing my random thoughts on it arranged by date.  That would be a large project, though, and at the moment I want for time.  So if you have ideas for shorter things that you’d like to read in the meantime, drop me a line in the comments.

Its time for a little spring cleaning and I’m (finally) clearing out the cobwebs around here.  As a result, I’ll be moving my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress installation, changing the theme a bit, and reorganizing things substantially.  Your old bookmarks and links will continue to function because WordPress is redirecting the old URL to here, but I’d suggest you update them to http://www.kalzumeus.com anyhow.

Exceptionally diligent readers will remember that Kalzumeus was the code name for my webapp which did not end up actually making it to production.  Sadly, I just got too busy with the day job to get it out the door, and I lost faith in the business model.  Plus tweaking Bingo Card Creator has given me plenty of opportunities to play around with Ruby on Rails under the hood.  I swear, even in the all-Java, all-the-time world of my day job I find myself dreaming in Rails (as you would be, too, if you had just put in a 60 hour workweek doing a partial reimplementation of ActiveRecord and having to fight the environment every step of the way to make it happen).

Anyhow, I am generally pretty poor at naming things.  Kalzumeus is hard to spell and not exactly the most natural of words, but I picked in it a fit of self-indulgence from a character I wrote into a story many years ago.  He was a sarcastic, intelligent, and slightly hyperactive dragon, and makes as good a mascot as any.  More importantly, he is the very first bit of IP I came up with while old enough to understand what the word meant, and I have a little bit of nostalgia for the moment of creation.  I think I’ll get a picture done of him for the masthead… 

For branding purposes, eh, I expect most people will continue to find this blog through bookmarks or Googling variations of “Patrick the bingo card guy” for the time being.  If you’re just starting out your uISV journey, do as I say and not as I do here: obscure in-jokes which are not easy to spell are probably not the best of ideas.

This reminds me: I have had the papers lying around for incorporating Kalzumeus LLC for a while but have never gotten around to it.  Ahh well, one of these days when I have a reason to do so…

(Speaking of which: I finally found out how to move a blog off of WordPress without screwing up all your readers and search engine juice.  First, purchase a domain of your choice.  Second, point the domain’s DNS at ns1.wordpress.com , ns2.wordpress.com, ns3.wordpress.com for about a day.  Third, go to your WordPress control panel, click upgrade, click domain, click add the domain, pay WordPress $10 through Paypal, and then they will set up the new domain as an alias of your WordPress.com blog.  This isn’t quite what you want.  Go back to the domain panel and click the selection to use the new domain as primary, which will redirect yourblog.wordpress.com to it.  You’re now paying WordPress $10 a year for, essentially, a 301 redirect from your old blog to your new blog, and for blog hosting, but you can cut them out of the second half of the equation.  After you’ve announced the change and waited a month, cut your DNS settings to the hosting provider of your choice, where you have a WordPress blog set up with your old WordPress.com postings pre-loaded.  Nobody will even notice the second changeover, including Google.

 Why would you want to do this?

• Control over the domain — you can now install whatever you want on it
• A somewhat more visually distinctive design than the oh-so-wonderful WordPress blue
• Branding, if you’re into that
• Gets rid of WordPress AdSense ads on your site
• You can commercialize your site, if you’re into that stuff
• You can integrate your blog with other content on the same domain.  I’m planning on doing some fun stuff later, after I get the new site changed over and looking pretty (likely at least a month from now). 

Folks ask this once in a while on the Business of Software boards: exactly how important are download sites to a uISV’s promotion strategy? 

Confirmed Installs By Download Location in March 2008:

Any questions?

(OK, it isn’t quite that cut and dried.  I’d still recommend doing submission via Robosoft for the SEO benefits of the backlinks it will get, particularly for a new uISV.  However, in terms of driving downloads, download sites are all but worthless.  It is easy to figure out why if you watch users looking for software: rather than going to www.download.com and searching for it, they just Google it to start out with.)

Now that Easter is over and the accompanying surge and then dearth of traffic has passed I thought I would get cracking on the graphical twiddling.

The site, as it looked five minutes ago:

 The site, as it looks now:

There are also buttons in matching styles on the card download pages.  You can see it on the page about, say, a set of bingo cards about Japanese customs.

This set of logos is all done by Logo Samurai, including the header (with integration work by Gursimran).  Since it is technically difficult to split test the header on my current setup I’m going to have to sort of fudge it (i.e. look at the metrics for the next two weeks and see if it causes major changes or not).   Not the world’s best experimental design but oh well…