Announcing www.readalongkanji.com

I haven't made a post here for a while so I thought I'd make an update on my latest creation - readalongkanji.com. The site is still in its early stages but as you can see from the screen shot its still quite functional.

My overall aim is to end up with a site through which you can get custom made news reports on topics you like at your reading level with prompts and tools on hand to get you over the occasional reading "speed bumps" you come across.

ffmpeg and mingw

I love ffmpeg and all it stands for. It has developed into an amazing library with support for an incredible array of file formats, codecs and protocols. It's widely known, widely used and despite its complex options, a wide variety of front-end apps make working with it a lot easier for the layman.

For developers however, ffmpeg has a few stumbling blocks that tend to get in the way. I'm no expert by any means but I thought I'd share a few things I ran into while integrating ffmpeg into a browser plugin I've been working on.

Getting more for your Facebook Ad Money

Customer development is a concept that I wish I had learned about earlier. To suggest that you can test your customer bases response before, and during development and release products multiple times a day with basically no money would have been unheard of only a few short years ago. Testing your market before you jump in is one of the key concepts behind customer development and I thought I'd post a little about my experiences with the "$5 a day" approach to customer testing.

I've been using Facebook Ads for a while now to sell a free service I've worked on (and must get around to updating). This project was always intended as an experiment of sorts to gauge customer interaction and demand but one of the most interesting results came not from the project but from the advertising itself. Namely, how to get the most out of my advertising dollar. We ended up with a per-dollar click-through-rate improvement of  over 200% and we haven't yet started optimizing our ads themselves.