The Perceptus Back Story

About a week ago, we were approached by someone who wanted to buy the domain and content of our website, MyPhotoPrinter.net.

We decided to sell it, though, not without some sentimentality. MyPhotoPrinter.net  was one of our first websites.  It was the first, and currently the only, content site that we have created for our own operations.

Unfortunately, over the years, we weren’t able to invest enough time  in the site, and it fell into an unmaintained mode. That wasn’t a very good situation.  We never talked about the site much, in fact, this is probably the first and only mention of the site on this blog.

We wish the new owners of the site the best of luck.  We’ll be sure to visit once in a while.

The other day we added a Google Custom Search box to the top right of print-bingo.com, our awesome web based bingo card generator.  We’ll probably tidy up the setup if we discover that it is used frequently enough.  The nice thing for our setup is that we configured this Google Custom Search Engine to search the three sites that have print-bingo.com content, the site itself, our corporate blog (the site you are reading right now), and our support forum.

This is actually our second run-in with Google Custom Search.  Late last year we played around with this technology when we created KittenSearch.net, the cutest search engine in the world.  We still haven’t decided if we’ll keep KittenSearch.net around or not.  We learned a few things, and that was the primary goal.

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!

It’s time for some updates to print-bingo.com, the best web based bingo card generator on the internet! Heh, we’ve grown quite proud of this side project.

It’s off-peak times for the site, since school is out and the sun is shining. So, this is about the best time that we can find for updates to the site. Expect little bugs to pop up here and there.

Please feel free to let us know if you spot something that’s not quite right.

Today we updated print-bingo.com’s programming.

The biggest fix, is that our site now works properly in current versions of Google Chrome. Our web based system for generating highly printable bingo cards is great… but once in a while we run into compatibility issues. For now, it’s fixed. We’ve tested in current Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari web browsers. Ironically, part of the programming fix was related to a compatibility tweak for Mozilla browser from years back. Mozilla users, if you actually still exist, you will need to use a different browser to use print-bingo.com now.

At the same time, we made live a feature that we wrote for a custom bingo job a few months back. All bingo cards within a single run are now guaranteed to be unique. Previously, it was entirely random if a card was duplicated in a run – but it was highly, highly, unlikely. In fact, we programmed an email notification if the dupe-tester actually catches a dupe.

We had to hard-code a duplicate entry to actually make sure the dupe tester and the email notifier worked. The odds of duplicate cards that are randomly generated is extremely low – you can’t generalize exact odds, since every custom bingo card design is different.

The site has probably generated 1,000 card runs since the new code went live… and we haven’t been notified of a duplicate card yet. If we ever catch a dupe, we’ll be sure to post about it.

More code changes are on the way. It’s summer, traffic to print-bingo.com is lower than normal.