The Perceptus Back Story

With the recent automatic upgrade of Google Chrome to version 8, Google made their built in PDF viewer the default viewer *.  I.e. there is now no need to separately download Adobe Reader or Adobe Flash Player to browse the web with Google Chrome.

Generally, I like this addition to Google Chrome; however, it caused some work for us.  Our web based bingo card generator, print-bingo.com, is highly dependent on PDF’s.  That’s the sole reason why our bingo cards are dead-easy to print out by the hundreds.  Unfortunately, Chrome’s built-in PDF renderer does not display PDFs that are in an IFRAME tag properly.

For the last few days, this is what users of print-bingo.com would see after generating 5 pages of bingo cards on print-bingo.com:

Broken PDF rendering in an IFRAME in Google Chrome 8 - screenshot from print-bingo.com

Chrome tries to scale the parent page to fit everything in… and it fails badly.

We were not able to get things working 100% the way we would like, but we have a workable situation now.

The basic steps that we had to take:

• Change from IFRAME to OBJECT tag.  For whatever reason, this fixes the zooming issue.  And it was quite simple.  In our case, there wasn’t much difference between the two HTML tags.
• Unfortunately, we can’t find a way to get Chrome to print the contents of the object tag without printing the rest of the page (though, perhaps using CSS  might work).
• Instead, we added some bold warning text that gives Chrome users instructions to use the manual download links. We use a little function to identify Chrome users – the two key lines of code are: 
  $u_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; 
  if(preg_match(‘/Chrome/i’,$u_agent)) { $ub = “Chrome”; }

So, we ended up with a workaround.  We sincerely hope that Google will add the missing interface elements that will make things just work, but until then, we are doing some other site improvements as we prepare to bump up the price of Premium Access to $12 in 2011.

* If you want to go back to using Adobe Reader in Google Chrome, you can turn off the  built-in viewer by going to the special address about:plugins and change Chrome PDF Viewer to Disable.  Of course, website owners should not depend on end-users to do this just to visit your site!

We finally decided to create a Harry Potter word list for our Harry Potter themed Bingo cards for print-bingo.com.  Check it out now!  You can play your customized bingo game while you wait in line to see the movie!

Entry level access to our web based bingo card generator is free!  An upgrade of $10 will get you a few extra features.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American viewers. We hope that your turkey is especially tasty this year!

If you are looking for a way to spend some family time before or after the turkey has been served, we suggest Thanksgiving themed bingo cards. You’ll find that Thanksgiving word list, and many more,  at print-bingo.com.  Basic use our site is free – including customizing the cards!

We’ve added a new word list for our template bingo card design collection, so, please welcome our new Columbus Day Themed Bingo Cards.

That  set of word lists is getting hard to browse, we’re going to have to improve the template listings page soon!

Also fitting for this time of year:

• Canadians!  Our Thanksgiving Word List is alive and waiting for you!  Unfortunately, it’s a little American-centric, since most of our business is  from the USA. You’ll have to edit the word list to make it more Canadian.
• Our Halloween Word List is getting a lot of search engine traffic – already!

Some other recent items of note:

• If you’re a fan of Bingo on Facebook, look out for our revised Facebook advertising campaign.  We’ll see if we get an ROI on these ads this time around.  We tried Facebook advertising two years ago, and it was a dismal failure.
• Our Facebook “like” button was initially mis-configured.  Whoops.  After fixing it, we discovered a whole lot of “likes” that were built up, presumably from the Share link that has been part of the site for years. Nice!

Thanks for using Print-Bingo.com.  Basic use of our bingo card generator is still free!  And an upgrade for the entire feature set is still only $10… for now.

We’ve run campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords from day 1.  Actually, we ran ads before the site was even on the print-bingo.com domain.  So, it’s been years.

We learned this week that Google has quality checks to make sure that AdWords customers are running legitimate websites.  I.e. they don’t want to sell advertising to scammers, malware installers, virus tricksters, and whatever Google deems to be low quality sites.  As with all things Google, these are highly automated processes. This quality score concept  makes sense –  I would be less likely to click on ads if there was a chance that the landing page was virus laden.

Apparently,  after our large edits to print-bingo.com in  August, we tripped the quality scanner and our AdWords campaigns  were turned off.  We sent a support request in to Google and a few days later, after a manual review, our ads are now running again.  Yay!  More advertising expenses.  :)

The strangest thing is that we didn’t even notice for two weeks.  We’re happy to say that sales are up so much year over year, that we just didn’t notice.  It did seem weird that we weren’t getting many (in retrospect, zero) referrals from Google AdWords that lead to conversions, but that happens some days, so it didn’t shout problem.

What’s the point of this post?  Well, actually, I think we’re bragging about our increased sales.  But on a practical note, make sure you watch your campaigns – I couldn’t find a way to get email notifications, but it might be buried in the interface somewhere.  You can always watch your logs.  Anyway, the point is, even if things are going well, it’s possible that they could still go better.

Technical notes: If you want to see when you’ve been visited by the quality bot?  Check your web access logs for the user agent AdsBot-Google.