Archive for October, 2010

Our New Web Based Whitespace Trimming Tools

Friday, October 29th, 2010

We added a couple new tools to Web Tools by Perceptus today.  We also cleaned up the look of the site a little – it’s gone all the way from ugly to almost passable.  Similar to our blog, over time, the trickle of traffic to our web based text mangling site has grown, and it had earned a bit of our effort to tidy it up. Who knows, if this keeps up, we’ll have to keep adding more tools!

The new tools?

  • The Whitespace Trimmer – Paste a blob of text. Every line  of text will be trimmed of spaces on the left and right and returned to you.
  • The Blank Line Remover – Paste a blob of text.  Every blank line will be removed.

Like the rest of the site, the clipboard is your friend.  Run one tool.  Copy the result to the clipboard, and run another one of our tools on the result.

 

 

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in efficient, tools, tools.perceptus.ca | No Comments »

Does Google Apps for Domains work in China?

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Today I got a call from someone whom I helped setup with Google Apps for domains.  Primarily, he’s using Google to handle his email – it’s pretty much the exact same system that powers GMail, but under your own domain name.  We use it too for perceptus.ca email.  It’s awesome.  You can use the excellent webmail interface,  and IMAP for full desktop and mobile email applications.  Plus,  it’s free if you don’t need very many user logins.

If you have a vanity domain for yourself, get Google to host your email.  You won’t find anything better, especially for $0.

Anyway, my client is in China, behind the world’s biggest firewall.  And he can’t access his email.  His web requests get  forwarded to weird places. Ironically, he sounded rather pleased, since he’s actually on vacation, but it did raise some good questions.

Does Google Apps for Domains email actually work in China?  I don’t know, it might be a weird forwarding bug.  I’m not there now, so I can’t experiment with it.  If someone reads this and can confirm success or failure with Google Apps for Domains, that would be excellent.  Unfortunately, this is some info that I can’t seem to find on the Internet.

As an aside, in  trying to figure this out, I stumbled on  Google’s Transparency Report.  It’s a fun way to see if Google services are blocked in different countries at any given time.

I wonder if any of Perceptus’ websites are blocked in China?

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in China, email, Google | 2 Comments »

The Importance of Customer Feedback Surveys!

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

We admit it.  There is room for improvement at print-bingo.com.   We still firmly believe we operate the best web based bingo card generator.  Period.  However, there always has been a long list of items on the to-do list.  In our defense, we never really expected the site to continue to grow the way that it has.  In many ways, features were put-off until the traffic justified the effort.

We decided that we were long overdue to start actively seeking  feedback from our paid  users.  So we did.  Obviously, we used our own hosted survey service, PapayaPolls.com.  Eventually, we’ll create a separte survey for non-Premium users of our site too.  Both will be updated and revised as we go along.

We’ve got a handful of responses so far.  While there are no clear patterns, the input is extremely valuable.  It’s a highly recommended exercise.   After all, shouldn’t all decisions be data driven, if possible?

Tags:, , ,
Posted in incrementalism, marketing, papayapolls.com, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

Columbus Day Themed Bingo Cards

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

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.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in advertising, bingo cards, canadian, FaceBook, holiday, print-bingo.com, word list | No Comments »