Noah Jorgensen

RTW: Madrid

2012-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Round the World (RTW) Trip

The Round the World trip blog entries are a collection of automagically generated blog entries based on my trip around the world. During my travels I periodically update simple text files for each location, with my experiences, thoughts and the people that I meet. The content is very stream of thought; entries are written in short, ocassionally incomplete, sentences. Enjoy!

6/8

first day relaxed in lobby upon arriving

randomly two girls came in from mad hostel and asked if I wanted to go get tapas

i said yes

group of 5 of us, adrian, ‘murrika’, raphael and marianna

go to 3 different little bars, getting sangria and tapas

we decide to meet up tomorrow for a walking tour and then that night for pub crawl

Dropbox Referrals with Google AdWords

2012-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

How many times has a service asked you to refer a friend? How many of those times did you manage to convince more than a few friends to sign up? All too often web applications ask users to share a referral URL with their friends in order to increase the exposure of their application. Unfortunately for me, I don’t necessarily always have 32 friends who I can convince and happen to not have already heard about the product I’m referring them.

Enter Google AdWords

What better way to spread my referral URL than through a Google Adwords campaign? Using some free credit I had from a promotional code I was able to create a campaign without using money from my own pocket.

This was the only ad I created. The destination URL is the short URL dropbox provides each user for referring new users. The ad displays for keyword searches with terms such as ‘online storage’, ‘free online backup’, etc. You have to be creative here because a lot of the terms are highly competitive and require large bids to present on the first page. If a user clicks the ad, they are directed to the dropbox sign up page and from there Dropbox handles the rest. In order for me to obtain the credit, they not only have to sign up for Dropbox but install the software. Pretty simple.

Results and Analysis

For the past few hours I’ve seen small Dropbox notifications on regular 5 or so minute intervals informing that my space has increased by another 512 MB. When I woke up this morning I had 31 emails from Dropbox informing me that referrals had installed Dropbox after getting my invite.

For a total of $57.21 from my existing credit, I obtained 16 GB of extra dropbox space. Since it didn’t cost me anything, I’m pleased with the result however, if we look at the numbers, roughly 60 dollars to get 16 GB of permanent Dropbox space, is not that expensive considering it costs 10 dollars a month to get an extra 48 GB. I had obtained the maximum referral size bonus (16 GB) for a free account, overnight in roughly 18 hours.

In total the AdWords campaign accumulated 43,000 impressions and 559 total clicks amounting to a clickthrough rate (CTR) of about 1.3%. This number is dragged down significantly by what google calls it’s ‘Display Network’ which is apparently any Google service which presents ads. If we look only at the ads resulting from keyword searches, we see CTRs as high as 17% for the term ‘online backup’ and 13% for ‘dropbox’. The average cost for a click (CPC) for the term ‘dropbox’ was about 10 cents. The majority of the clicks came from the ‘dropbox’ keyword surprisingly. This tells me something I did not know about how a lot of people apparently use Google search. Users are searching for the term ‘dropbox’, and instead of going through the first result which is a link to the actual Dropbox website, opt to click my ad and sign up.

As you can see from the graph above of the clickthrough vs joined vs installed ratios, the conversion rate for a click is fairly low, at 16% joining the service. However once they’ve joined we have a 60% chance that they will install the software and give me the bonus space from the referral, not bad. I’m also assuming that some users will install the software at some point in the future as Dropbox has internal methods of encouraging the user to install the software.

Skyrim: Alchemy Helper

2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has consumed all of my free time since it was released on the 11th this month. During this time I have discovered I have a very completionist mindset. Upon looking at the Alchemy system I realized that there were thousands of recipes due to almost a hundred different ingredients and each having 4 effects.

I wanted to make the best potions.

Skyrim Alchemy

Here’s a brief summary of the Alchemy system for those of you unfortunate enough to not yet have played Skyrim. There are 92 different ingredients each of which have 4 effects. A potion can contain up to three ingredients with a minimum of two required. The alchemy involves overlapping ingredient effects. For example, if I combine two ingredients with the ‘Fortify Magicka’ effect, the result is a potion with that effect. However the optimum strategy in obviously to find the ingredient combinations which result in many effects.

Python Script

This problem of discovering the combinations of different ingredients is not simple, so I wrote a python script to find them for me. The script, skyrim-alchemy-helper, can be found over at github. Given an initial ingredient, the script will find all recipes for a discovering the most effects of that ingredient. Most of the time the script is able to find a 3 ingredient combination which will cover all 4 effects. Alternatively, if you want to discover the recipe for which you gain the most number of effects, even if you do not cover the four initial there is a flag for doing just that.

I was very proud of this script and using it and a combination of grep and awk, I was able to put all of my ingredients to good use discovering their effects. I released the script on github but most people wanted to be able to use a ‘website’ to do this and hadn’t the faintest clue that python wasn’t just a variety of snake.

Skyrim Alchemy Recipe Helper (Web Application)

Enter the Skyrim Alchemy Recipe Helper.

I spent the better part of tonight working on getting this prototype working. Go check it out on the Heroku dyno it’s currently running on. It isn’t anything fancy but I have plans for improvement already. There will be a way to filter the resulting recipes for specific effect(s) and/or ingredient(s). There will also be way, once I do further testing, to determine the potency of the combination (since I believe having more copies of the same effect increases the potency).

Play around with it and give me feedback. I’m always listening on Twitter and read all emails (even if I don’t reply to them all)!

PIXEL CRASH

2011-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

After the staggering mediocrity of my first few renders, I immediately made elaborate plans to create my next video. And here it is, five months of 110-hour weeks later. Well, maybe I mostly spent those five months putting it off. But you can imagine what it’d look like if I spent 110-hour weeks on it! It would have been magical!

Instead, I bring you this one.

P I X E L C R A S H

This stemmed from wanting to experiment with the voxel plugin from Robert Leger over at robertleger.net (go check out his blog, great stuff). Lathered heavily with inspiration from the Pixels video by Patrick Jean.