Full screen in Opera

Published on October 8, 2005 in General. Closed

Opera browser has become completely free not long ago. This is a very nice browser with a great interface and with a very fast rendering engine.

So I’ve started to use Opera occasionally and the single feature that makes me come back to Opera again and again is a full screen mode. It’s hard to invent something new here, right? Well, apparently Opera engineers didn’t think so and they have created the greatest full screen mode I’ve ever seen.

When you hit F11 in Opera, the page that you are currently viewing takes over the whole screen on your monitor. There is absolutely no bars, navigation buttons or anything else from the browser, just a pure web page. This really feels awesome! You should definitely try it yourself.

Of course a screenshot won’t do this feature justice, but still here is our new site in Opera’s full screen mode (this is exactly as I’ve seen this page, I’ve just made a screenshot and decreased its size, the image was not edited in any other way!):

Stuffed Guys in Full Screen on Opera

Our creative power

Published on October 7, 2005 in Stuffed Guys. Closed

It has happened so that all of us in Stuffed Guys are Leos (astrologically speaking). And one of the powers that all Leos possess is creativity. I think I can rephrase this and say that the greatest power of Stuffed Guys as a company is creativity.

This is true. We are full of ideas all of the time. And not only about programming and web technologies, Ivan and Shalmoo periodically compose music, for example. I myself am a little creative in everything, including this blog.

So creativity is our main weapon. And we have a top secret plan (just don’t tell anyone, k?) that is making use of our main weapon to smash the competition.

After the initial release of each of our products, we will get so creative with the new versions and will release them so fast that our competition will have a hard time trying to catch up with us. Eventually we will take over the world — all thanks to our extraordinary creative selves.

Nice plan, eh?

PPC frustration

Published on October 6, 2005 in Pay Per Click (PPC). 9 Comments

Make’em click!

I originally thought that the main thing you need to worry about with pay per click (PPC) advertising is how to understand which keywords and creative copies bring you quality visitors that eventually convert. You could then keep these quality keywords and even increase maximum bids for them, and dump all the others that do not perform. That’s why we’ve even created our own conversion tracking software.

My latest experience with Google AdWords shows that I was wrong wrong wrong. As it turns out the main problem that you face when starting your first PPC campaign is how to make people click on your adverts at all. That’s right, you don’t have to worry about keywords performance or conversion rates, because you need to make these damn people click at first! No click = no love = no point to measure conversion.

Not so broad

The next thing that came as a surprise to me were “broad matches”. This is a term that Google uses to describe keywords that you can specify in you ad campaign:

If you include general keyword or keyword phrases — such as tennis shoes — in your keyword list, your ads will appear when a user’s query contains tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads will also automatically show for expanded matches, including plurals and relevant variations.

The description above is from Google’s own FAQ. What they don’t tell you is that broad matches do not always work as, well.. broad matches. For example, if I will enter “conversion tracking” in the list of keywords, my ad will appear when someone is searching for “conversion tracking”, but nothing is displayed when someone is searching for “conversion tracking software”!

I couldn’t believe this at first, I thought I was doing something wrong. But it appears that this is a normal Google’s behavior. There is an Ads Diagnostic Tool that shows to you the reason why your ad is not displayed for some keywords, so for “conversion tracking software” I got the following response:

Ad not shown. Reason: The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement.

Yeah, well, whatever (more information about this at webmasterworld.com).

The funny thing is — I can always specify “conversion tracking software” as a new keyword for my ad group and then my ad would display for this keywords too. So what the hell are they talking about with this message about low clickthrough rate for this keyword? I don’t get it.

No redirects allowed on Overture

Finally, as it turns out in Overture redirects are not allowed as target URLs for the ads. They don’t have a specific rule that says this, but they insist that the “Back” button in the visitor’s browser should take the visitor back to the search results after he or she clicks on my ad. Apparently redirect URLs break the “Back” button? Why Google accepts them then?

Anyway, all of my 20 or so new listing on Overture got rejected almost immediately after submission with a remark that the URL is bad. So it seems that it is not possible to use split tests with Overture at all, since redirect URL is a requirement with any split test. Oh well…

Much later: I was wrong. Overture does accept redirect URLs. Read details in the comments.

How we launched Stuffed Tracker

Published on October 5, 2005 in Stuffed Tracker. Closed

Development of the completely new version of Stuffed Tracker took us almost 9 months. We re-wrote the software from ground up and in a different language (previous version was in Perl, the latest version is in PHP).

The final 2 months before the release was a constant race with time. Everyday during the course of these months it seemed to us that only several days are left before the release. But then new bugs were found and new important features were invented.

I personally have slept around 4-5 hours a day in the last 2 weeks before the release. I was preparing a Complete User Guide for the software. The final version of the Guide has more then 152,000 characters (with spaces) which is my new record for documents in any language (the Guide is in English).

As it turned out, writing complete documentation for a software product is a great way to actually test the software. I’ve found lots of new bugs while writing the Guide. I’ve also found inconsistencies in the interface and in some functionality, which we fixed of course before the release.

Soon, we should repeat this entire “launch nightmare” again with our project management software. I can’t say that I will be happy doing this again, but I definitely like the feeling of polish that Stuffed Tracker now has. I want to feel the same about Factory Nova.

Factory Nova status update

Published on October 4, 2005 in Factory Nova. Closed

It was a long time since my last post about Factory Nova here. Now that we’ve finally released Stuffed Tracker (I’ll post a separate story about this later) we can concentrate on finishing Factory Nova.

I think I can safely say that 90% of the functionality is already complete in Factory Nova. We are using it ourselves for around 6 months now and I can report that it helped us a lot in the Stuffed Tracker development.

Most interesting features added in the last 30 days:

  1. Filters for tasks — we now have powerful filters in the Tasks module. With filters we can specify certain conditions and display only the tasks that match these conditions (for example, tasks assigned to a certain user or users or tasks assigned to me with the high priority and with a deadline in the next 3 days). Filters could be saved for easy re-use later.
  2. Modules could be switched off — now it is possible to select what modules you want to have in a particular project (we currently have Tasks, Emails, Forums, Knowledge Base and Files available). So we can now have a project that only has Forums module, for example (we’ve called this project “Lounge” and this is a place where the team hangs out and posts interesting news and stuff).
  3. Labels — we can assign one or more labels to any task and then use filters to quickly see tasks belonging to one or more labels. This is a very flexible solution. Labels could be used to mark tasks that should be done for a certain version release, or tasks that are “Bugs” or tasks that are “Features” and so on.
  4. Tree view and a flat list — it is now possible to view the tasks both as a tree and as a flat list. I’ve never seen this functionality in other project management software, but it is really useful. Sometimes you need a tree view, and sometimes you need a flat view (where tasks are sorted by priority, deadline, etc).

And finally, we are experimenting with file uploads in Flash 8 that was released not long ago. It looks like a little revolution, actually. Finally it is possible to upload a file or even several files from inside the browser and see the progress of the upload. It is even possible to cancel the upload while it is in progress.

Moscow River near our office

Published on October 3, 2005 in Moscow. Closed

Our office is located very near the Moscow River and today in the morning I took a very nice walk along the river with my camera. It was a very nice day too.

Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 001 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 007 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 012 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 017 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 020 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 021 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 024 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 027 Vorobyevi Gori - October 2005 037

PPC advertising for the first time

Published on October 2, 2005 in Stuffed Tracker. Closed

Starting from tomorrow, we will begin our first PPC advertising campaign. This might seem strange that we haven’t done any PPC advertising and yet created an Excellent Conversion Tracking Tool specially for measuring effectiveness of such advertising.

But actually there is nothing strange in this. Although we haven’t done any PPC advertising ourselves we have several clients who heavily advertise through Yahoo/Overture, Google and Miva. We have developed several custom tracking solutions for them during the course of the previous 3 years. And by now we know a lot about this stuff.

But still — no actual experience.

I think I have an interesting idea how we can spice things up here. We are going to create a special landing page that will display everything that Stuffed Tracker knows about the current visitor. Where he or she arrived from, from what search engine, what he or she was searching for, what actions this visitor has performed on our site, whether he or she has downloaded files or viewed screenshots already.

In my opinion, this will be a great showcase of the actual Stuffed Tracker capabilities and a fast way to explain to the visitor what the software is all about.

Also, with the help of the split testing functionality available in Stuffed Tracker, I would be able to send the visitors from one advert to different pages of the site and then measure which pages were most effective for what actions (download of a trial!) or sales. This should clearly show if the “showcase” page is a good idea or not.

Conversion tracking with Stuffed Tracker

Published on October 1, 2005 in Stuffed Tracker. Closed

It always seemed amusing to us how we are going to create this completely new version of our conversion tracking tool and will use it to track its own conversion rates. Kind of like “eating your own dog food meets recursion” concept.

And we are finally doing this for real, which is a little weird. After 9 months of non-stop development of the product all the plans that we have thought through are coming to life.

With the new version of Stuffed Tracker we are tracking downloads of the trial version, sales (of course) and even particular screenshots views. Very interesting stuff.

Actions statistics

New site, new product, new life

Published on September 29, 2005 in Stuffed Guys and Stuffed Tracker. Closed

Oh, yes!

I don’t have enough energy left to say something original here. So here is a quote from the announcement in our forums:

We are very pleased to announce that two important things have just happened.

  1. We’ve finally completed a 9 months development of the brand new version of Stuffed Tracker, our conversion tracking software. The new version was rewritten in PHP with tons of new exciting features added.
  2. Today we’ve also launched our new corporate site starring “Mr. Stuffed”, a stuffed doll from our logo.

New site screenshot:

Brand New Stuffed Guys HQ

Stuffed Tracker final screenshot:

Stuffed Tracker 2.0.0

Ok, we are now going home to sleep.

Excessive way of creating software

Published on September 11, 2005 in Factory Nova, Software Engineering and Stuffed Tracker. Closed

It’s a popular theme these days — make your software as simple as possible; instead of implementing something, make a shift in your mind and think of what NOT to implement.

Well, we do it kind of differently. We implement everything we can imagine while we have time. This is done on purpose. I need to see everything that is possible before I can understand which features are really exessive and which features are ideal for the software.

This makes the software messy at some point. A lot of stuff is in it, a lot of features of different quality. But I think it is very important to see and be able to use them all. This allows me to see the big picture, to understand how the software should work to feel perfect (at least for some of the users).

When I see that we’ve tried all the ideas, it’s time to sit down and thouroughly think through all the features and decide which of them should go away, which should be changed or combined together. It’s not an easy task, but after finishing with it we get an excellent software product.

Currently, Stuffed Tracker has already undergone this polishing phase and Factory Nova will only reach it in around 1 month.