Erin Jeong

[simplehacks]

Intelligent Content: A Primer

As a mobile game marketer, I optimize for app engagements. Free-to-play mobile games have a low barrier to entry. You can download a game to try it out before committing to pay. This means that it's easy to convert users to players by using mobile ads that send users to the App Store.

How should you market a more sophisticated app with a higher barrier to entry? It may take several touch points before someone decides to try the product. How do we ensure that we are addressing the users' needs at every touch points?

Intelligent Content: A Primer provides a good framework for creating a content strategy.

Intelligent Content has the following characteristics:

Modular

Structured

Reusable

Format Free

Semantically Rich

We can tie entire marketing efforts around this content strategy. Segmenting user groups by the funnel and create targeted content for each stage.

Every placement is a marketing opportunity. This includes paid ads, organic social post, blog posts - or any interactions a company has with the users.

Utilizing Intelligent Content in marketing would take the following steps:

List out all possible user types and stages of the funnels.

Generate contents based on the list above, and play with iterations. -There may be many ways to capture an idea, whether in text copies or creatives. This step is akin to generating creative strategies.

Run the above contents and iterate based on performance

The key is “performance.” How do you measure the performance of content? A well strategized content will improve the conversion rate to the next funnel.

Next on my reading list is Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide.

[simplehacks]

Peter’s Laws

The Creed of The Persistent and Passionate Mind

If anything can go wrong, Fix It!... to hell with Murphy!

When given a choice... take both!!

Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.

Start at the top and then work your way up.

Do it by the book... but be the author!

When forced to compromise, ask for more.

If you can’t win, change the rules.

If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them.

Perfection is not optional.

When faced without a challenge, make one.

"No” simply means begin again at one level higher.

Don’t walk when you can run.

When in doubt: THINK!

Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.

The squeaky wheel gets replaced.

The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.

The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!

The ratio of something to nothing is infinite.

You get what you incentivize.

If you think it is impossible, then it is... for you.

An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how it can’t be done.

The day before something is a . breakthrough it’s a crazy idea.

If it were easy it would have been done already.

Without a target you’ll miss it every time.

Fail early, fail often, fail forward!

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind.

Bureaucracy is an obstacle to be conquered with persistence, confidence and a bulldozer when necessary.

Source: http://www.diamandis.com/peters-laws

[simplehacks]

App Store Trends

Woke up this morning to find Enlight on the Featured app list.

Half asleep, I tapped on it. It wasn’t Enlight. It was Enlight Photofox, a.k.a Enlight 2. Given the 72 ratings averaging 2 stars for the title I’m immensely in love with, I immediately knew this version charges users on a Subscription basis, instead of original one-time payment Paid app.

Lately I’ve been seeing more and more apps switching to the Subscription model. Accompanying this change are many angry reviews and terribly low rating.

Three of my favorite apps that recently introduced subscription to existing app, or released a new Free + Subscription version of the app.

I can understand the anger of the users who suddenly find that the app they have paid for is now on a subscription model where the users have to pay on a regular basis. They have already paid for the app, so why pay - not just once more, but on a continuous basis?

There’s a funny psychology at play here. If the developers convert the existing paid app to a Free + Subscription model, thereby sabotaging existing paid users (existing loyal supporters) who have already paid, but now need to pay again for the subscription while the new users get it for free and only need to pay for the subscription, then the users have all the reason to be angry. This simply isn’t fair. Gaiam realized this and updated their Yoga Studio app on 6/22 so that existing users have access to the content that they have already paid for, and making it optional to subscribe for additional contents.

However, why do the users feel betrayed if the developer releases a brand new app that’s Free + Subscription? You still have your own paid app. Lightricks even replied to one particularly angry review on Enlight 2 that they will still be supporting Enlight 1, which I thought was a caring move. While it’s likely that the original paid version won’t have the latest and shiniest features but still, it won’t be abandoned.

And why is it that for health apps like Headspace or Calm the subscription model (not cheap either) is fine? Double standards here?

We, the users, need to understand that a one time payment of a measly $3.99 or $7.99 isn’t enough to support the continuous development and support of the app. The apps in the App Store these days are no longer simple hobbies that started off 9 years ago. They are powerful, quality apps that companies are built on. We easily spend that on Starbucks Coffee and why is it so hard to appreciate these developers? Calm down.

[simplehacks]

2 Ways to Preserve Syntax Highlighting in Evernote

1. Copy the formatted code in HTML into Evernote

The easiest way to do preserve highlighting is to use a tool that will format your code and output the HTML, which you copy and paste to Evernote. http://markup.su/highlighter/ is a simple online syntax highlighter with auto language detection and supports different styles.

Simply paste the code into “Source code”, copy the “Preview” and paste it into Evernote. 

2. Use 3rd Party Evernote Editors, like http://marxi.co/

Marxico is a powerful Markdown editor for Evernote, that supports supporting code highlight, LaTeX & flow charts, inserting images & attachments. It offers free trial of 10 days after which you need to pay $15.99/year.

[simplehacks]

Improve productivity with simple tools (that you already use)

Many people look for that one single application that magically helps you to be more productive. In my opinion, what you need is your own system, and you can easily identify apps that complement your system.

I use a combination of Evernote and Google calendar. I also subscribe to the 10-minute rule from Getting Things Done, and utilize Pomodoro Technique for larger tasks.

Here’s a snippet of what I do every morning:

Scan through the note in Evernote and decide the tasks for the day by breaking large projects to 25-minute manageable tasks and by using 10-minute rule.

Add tasks into the Google Calendar. Make sure every hour of the day is accounted for, including lunch and breaks in between. 

Review the day’s performance, and add remaining tasks to the separate day note and/or to the calendar.

The benefit of writing down all the tasks into a simple notebook and then adding the important tasks into the calendar reminds you that we have limited number of hours per day, and pushes you to prioritize important tasks.

In addition, by allocating specific time to each tasks, you can give 100% focus to the task at hand.

Reviewing your progress every day is critical to your success, as you tweak the process here and there to better fit your needs.

The same method can be repeated on a yearly, monthly, and weekly basis to make sure you’re on track of achieving your goals.

[simplehacks]

How to stay organized

Staying organized means more than just completing tasks, or cleaning up your room. It is about making decisions - deciding what to do with that work, or that items lying around in your room. Being organized helps you lead a more deliberate life.

If we were able to make decisions for every issue or item we come across, we would be very organized, but in reality, we do not. This is due to our limited cognitive resources. Often we do not know how to deal with a certain issue, or what you should do with that item on your desk so we brush it off for later. And the procrastination begins. 

There are ways to solve this -

1. Decide in advance - You can plan in advance what you’re going to do in a given situation, thus taking off some load off your mental capacity at the actual time this happens. In the physical world, this would mean having a place for every item.

2. Have a set of criteria questions ready - If the issue or the item is out of the scope of what you have decided in advance, do not panic. Do not let go of it until you have made a decision of what to do next, using your set of questions. What is the desired end outcome? What can you do now? Is it going to take more than 10 minutes?

3. Follow 10 minute rule (GTD) - If the next action can be completed within 10 minutes, do it now. If not, delegate it or schedule it on the calendar to follow up.

4. Keep only what you need and throw away or donate the rest - The default mode in any organizing is to get rid of anything unnecessary. Only keep what you truly need, like important letters. Get rid of all the junk.

Hope this helps you become a more conscious person! Good luck!

Resources:

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg Getting Things Done by David Allen Alejandra.TV by Alejandra (YouTube)

[simplehacks]

What I learned from building my portfolio webpage

Lately I’ve been doing Free Code Camp exercises in the evenings, and I finally finished the first Basic Front End Development Project, where you have to build your own portfolio page! It's still pretty much a basic outline, but I'll be updating it as I complete more projects.

I’ve been dabbling HTML & CSS on and off for a while now, but I haven’t really built anything yet (other than basic Tumblr themes) so this was a great exercise. I learned how to use Bootstrap to create beautiful responsive webpage, learned about media queries to render different views for different screen sizes. 

Below are some of the tools I used:

Started off with basic framework from Free Code Camp Codepen

Bootstrap structures! 

Fixed top navigation bar (example) and collapsing navigation bar into an icon in smaller screens (YouTube tutorial) - 

Smooth anchor scrolling (Codepen) and using CSS selectors in jQuery

Scrollspy - plugin is used to automatically update links in a navigation list based on scroll position.

Media queries for rendering different views for different screen sizes

background-attachment: fixed to keep background image even when scrolling

height: 100% to make each section/image fill the entire screen height

Font Awesome for awesome social icons!

Sticky footer

And troubleshooting as I went along, of course.

This may be really basic, but hope it helps those who are just starting out like me ;) Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and good luck to us!

[simplehacks]

HashTable Data Structure

[simplehacks]

Regular Expression

Wikipedia

In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular expression (abbreviated regex or regexp and sometimes called a rational expression)[1][2] is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations. The concept arose in the 1950s, when the American mathematicianStephen Kleene formalized the description of a regular language, and came into common use with theUnix text processing utilities ed, an editor, and grep (global regular expression print), a filter.

Regular expressions are so useful in computing that the various systems to specify regular expressions have evolved to provide both a basic and extended standard for the grammar and syntax;modern regular expressions heavily augment the standard. Regular expression processors are found in several search engines, search and replace dialogs of several word processors and text editors, and in the command lines of text processing utilities, such as sed and AWK.

Many programming languages provide regular expression capabilities, some built-in, for example Perl,JavaScript, Ruby, AWK, and Tcl, and others via a standard library, for example .NET languages, Java, Python and C++ (since C++11). Most other languages offer regular expressions via a library.

(Image source: http://rubular.com/)

[simplehacks]

Rules for if-statements (Ruby)

Every if-statement must have an else.

If this else should never run because it doesn't make sense, then you must use a die function in the else that prints out an error message and dies, just like we did in the last exercise. This will find many errors.

Never nest if-statements more than two deep and always try to do them one deep.

Treat if-statements like paragraphs, where each if-elsif-elsegrouping is like a set of sentences. Put blank lines before and after.

Your boolean tests should be simple. If they are complex, move their calculations to variables earlier in your function and use a good name for the variable.

(Source: Learn Ruby the Hard Way)

[simplehacks]

15 Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other

Why do these things correlate? These 15 correlations will blow your mind. (Is this headline sensationalist enough for you to click on it yet?)

Reading The Elements of Data Analytic Style now and came across this website! Hilarious!

[simplehacks]

Introducing the Time Management Matrix Template, attributed to Dwight Eisenhower. Setup in a Google Spreadsheet, it visualizes your most important tasks.

Awesome way to prioritize your tasks with a ready-made Google Spreadsheet template! I’m definitely going to try this!

(image from www.getsidekick.com)

[simplehacks]

2 Favorite Productivity Blogs

One of my favorite productivity blogs is by Buffer. Buffer is a service that let’s you post to multiple SNS channels and also schedule them. If you are paying members, you can have deeper insights and analysis on your posts. And they have amazing blog posts on productivity.

https://blog.bufferapp.com

Today I came across the Sidekick blog, and it’s got some great productivity tips as well! I sure will be reading more of their posts. 

http://www.getsidekick.com/blog/

[simplehacks]

Embedding Github Gist to Tumblr

https://gist.github.com/soemarko/1395926

Useful!

[simplehacks]

TV Log Template for Day One with Launch Center Pro

(This post is for beginners :) )

Here's the URL. As this template is for lazy people like me who don't want to minimize typing, you have to edit the fields before you can use it. (If not, your shows will all be titled something like "Title 1" and you won't have nice pictures like the above.)

dayone://post?entry=[list:Title|Title 1|Title 2|Title 3|%0A%7CShow%7C[list:Title|Title 1|Title 2|Title 3|]%7C%0A%7C%3A---%7C%3A---%7C%0A%7CImage%7C%7C%0A%7CSeason%7C[list:Season|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10]%7C%0A%7CEpisode%7C[list:Episode start #|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24]-[list:Episode end #|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24]%7C%0A%7CRating%7C[list:Rating|★☆☆☆☆|★★☆☆☆|★★★☆☆|★★★★☆|★★★★★]%7C%0A%7CNotes%7C[prompt:Notes]%7C%0A%0A%23TV%20%23Show%20%23Log

How to use: 

Replace Title 1, Title 2, and Title 3 with the show title of your choice. You can add more titles by adding | [name of the show]| in any "lists".

Upload or Google an image of your choice and replace ImageURL with this URL.

Other possible tweaks

The template asks for the title multiple times (twice for Title and once for Image) - thats because I wanted the title to be on the header of the post, header of the table, and also wanted to include a poster for the show. You can delete any one of this (because, they can be quite redundant)!

By default, the template assumes you watch more than one episode at one time, which is why you need to input first episode and last episode. If you typically watch just one episode, you can delete off [list:Episode end #|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14 |15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24].

Instead of using generic picture all the time, you can choose to select different image for every post that was memorable to the episode.

Hope that was useful! :) Let me know what your favorite templates are!

Helpful links: Tables

[simplehacks]

Resources for Day One & Launch Center Pro

I'm always looking for better ways of journaling and recently I came across 5 Minute Journal* - simple and beautiful, I just had to try it out! So I opened my Day One app again and I've been writing consecutively for more than a week now, one of the longest streak since I downloaded the app few years back. (Also I have to say I've been using android more frequently before I got an iPhone 6).

Last night I decided to read up on the Publish feature in Day One on its website, and I chanced up on "templates" for Day One and about how you can quickly create templates with Launch Center Pro (LCP henceforth)!

And oh my goodness, such automation sweetness! Not as powerful as Android (thinking: Tasker) but I'm impressed how much more efficiently we can use an iOS device. I was aware of Launch Center when it first came out but I've always thought it was merely just a folder and hadn't paid much attention to it. Now I've a lot of to catch up.

Below are some of the resources I've been reading up on to understand URL schemes and LCP better. 

Day One Templates - list of useful templates as well as good readings (some are listed below as well)

Automating iOS: A Comprehensive and Updated Guide to Launch Center Pro - A very long read, useful.

LCPEncoder created by Jeff Mueller - this app helps in encoding texts into LCP-readable code (as not all text is converted to Markdown as mentioned in his Jeff's post here)

Markdown basics - Day One uses Markdown. Always good to brush up in case you've forgotten

GitHub Flavored Markdown

MultiMarkdown 

Extended ASCII - for your reference (although you can use LCPEncoder mentioned above).

Example usage #1 by Tim Broder

Example usage #2 Mickaël le Gal, with helpful screenshots of end tables. 

Also, here's the my template for Daily Reviews following the 5 Minute Journal. You can write the first part using prompts, and come back to the same post at night to complete the evening portion. The credits for the questions go to the makers of 5 Minute Journal, and I strongly recommend you buy the book as it contains inspirational quotes and much more!