Icon Backup Screenshot

My hard drive failed a few months ago. We’ve all had it happen. But this time I had decent backups of all my files. At least, that is what I thought.

You’d be surprised how much valuable data exists that you do not realize that you are not backing up.

Surprisingly, one of my biggest losses was my MSN emoticons and avatars.

As a huge fan of MSN messenger, chatting to friends and colleagues around the globe, I slowly built up a sizable collection of MSN avatars, emoticons, and backgrounds.

I’m sure you can relate. I probably had close to 1000 images — all lost in an instant. It was only at this point, I realized how much they meant to me.

And thus the motivation behind this article and about my software, Icon Backup

Icon Backup lets you browse, recover, and backup images, avatars, emoticons, and more from MSN instant messenger installations. With the images, you can import into your favorite programs and share with friends.

The software itself is cheap, only $5.99 with decent support and a 30 day no questions asked money backed guarentee!

So check it out, at http://www.iconbackup.com and back up your msn messsenger emotions and avatars!

The topic of todays post is direct marketing. For those of you who don’t know what direct marketing is, direct marketing is a type of marketing. The goal is to obtain a direct response from a message embedded in a type of media, eg: advertising.

The core concept really is to illicit a measurable response from a communication, and methods to maximize response. This can be applied to selling products or having some action performed. The methods discussed here are direct mail but the concepts are relevant to websites and email.

Here is a great book that I am half way through:

So far it has covered advertising principles, offer generation, incentive generation, and mailing — highly recommended. I believe the principles of this can be applied to the internet and internet marketing.

In addition, I have found a few interesting videos from a man named Dan Kennedy. This man seems to really know what he is talking about and presents some very good ideas. I think there is alot to learn from this area for anyone interesting in making money online.

The videos, which can be found on google video, to search for are called:

Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing
Dan Kennedy’s 100 K in 100 Days Strategy
Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing Vol 2

I may post more resources as I immerse myself in the subject.

A few years ago I wrote a simple tool that does the following:

1. Takes a piece of text
2. Analyzes and counts each character in the text
3. Prints the results to the screen

It is a really simple idea but useful in encryption / decryption. If one knows the average character distribution of a language, one can perform character frequency analysis on an encrypted message and use the language character distribution to attempt to guess a key to the encryption scheme. This article isn’t about encryption however; it is about taking this old application and giving it a touch up.

Since this is a niche tool, I opted on multi language support. I used google translate to translate this application it to the most popular languages in use on the web. These translations might have issues, but if traffic begins to increase, I will request user feedback or look into budget professional translation services.

Here is a screen shot of the previous version:

Character Frequency Analyzer

Character Frequency Analyzer

As you can see, it is a very basic HTML interface with no frills.

I noticed a few problems with it right away:

1. Interface isn’t attractive
2. Ad placement is not optimized
3. Useless backlink
4. No feature to export analysis to an external program for processing (CSV export)
5. No linking program or incentive

I decided to touch it up, and here is what was done:

1. For the main template, I opted for a simple DIV layout with CSS controlling the font size, and colour. This allowed for more control of the page elements.
2. The font size was increased to make the text easy to read and generally increase usability across the site.
3. A backlink was removed to increase one way link quality.
4. Quick tip was introduced to implement a feature I don’t have time to create (export to CSV).
5. Site background was used to focus user attention on main interface. Thank you to Travis Beckham at Squid Fingers for his awesome patterned backgrounds!
6. Advertising was placed more strategically for increased CTR while maintaining usability.
7. A simple linking program was implemented

Check out the improvements yourself at the Character Frequency Analyzer

After these modifications, the following is expected:

1. Increased backlinks with new design attractiveness and linking program
2. Increase attractiveness for potential partners of the site
3. Increased ad CTR

This is an odd utility and I don’t expect much in terms of growth, but I am interested in seeing how this can be pushed.

The prototype release is coming soon

In the lab, more details coming soon

This is similar to the game of life rule set. The first shot is the initial state. Interesting.

The following is a sample of improvised bits of sound that use this technique. These sound clips are about 8 months old.

It’s implemented as a command line program which produces jpeg images.

Here is some outputs from my initial generations. Please note the following conditions:

1. the grid is a wrapping grid. that means top is connected to bottom, left is connected to right.
2. diagonal neighbors are not supported
3. 512 gridsize was used
4. 64 randomly placed cells were generated into the grid
5. a snap shot was taken every 25 cycles: ((i % 25) == 0)

There are 256 rules which can be applied. This is an example of just 1 rule.

1. phase 0 (init)

2. phase 25

3. phase 50

4. phase 75

5. phase 100

6. phase 125

7. phase 150

8. phase 175

9. phase 200

10. phase 225

9. phase 250