Erich Stauffer

Author: Erich Stauffer

  • One Night – a Rock Musical

    This is a story about three boys and one girl who meet on a train “one night”

    This is a “jukebox musical” compilation I made on Spotify which weaves a story out of pop songs. You can listen to it on Spotify here: One Night

    [Act I]

    1. Some Nights by Fun – Three boys looking for something to stand for decide to stay up all night and start walking towards the train station.

    2. Breathe Me by Sia – A girl named Valerie is walking the streets alone at night after selling herself for drugs. She gets on the train.

    3. Kill Your Heroes by Awol Nation – The boys notice her sitting alone and afraid and decide to approach her.

    4. Shake it Out by Florence and the Machine – The train stops and they all get off the train downtown and go into a club where Valerie sings while one boy goes to the bar and the other two go off to the bathroom.

    5. We are Young by Fun – The boy at the bar begins courting Valerie inside the club. They end up leaving the club together and walking along the street together.

    6. Lights by Ellie Goulding – The girl ends up talking about how much she misses her home and begins walking back towards the train when the other two boys appear.

    7. Ho Hey by The Lumineers – One of the boy begins singing to Valerie stating that she should be his sweetheart instead. She doesn’t want anything to do with him.

    8. Wide Awake by Katy Perry – Valerie then realizes now what she has to do and she goes home to her family.

    9. I Will Wait by Mumford & Sons – One of the boy begins to kneel down and begins singing to her about how he will wait for her.

    10. The Cave by Mumford and Sons – They boys get off of the train and begin walking home as the sun rises.

    [Act II]

    11. Fiction by The xx – One boy wakes up lamenting the night before. He curses the daylight and the light of day between him and Valerie.

    12. Madness by Muse – Another boy wakes up back at home in his room and begins singing about Valerie. He realizes what she needs and begins to make a plan.

    13. It’s Time by Imagine Dragons – the third boy wakes up and refuses to change who he is or where he came from. He wants to bend the world to his will – and because of that he is lonely.

    14. Both of Us by Taylor Swift and B.o.B. – Valerie wakes up at her house and is confronted by her angry father. She ends up realizing why she left home in the first place and begins running back to meet one of the boys.

    15. Glad You Came by The Wanted – Valerie meets one of the boys and he begins to sing to her about how glad he is that she’s come back.

    16. Good Time by Owl City and Carly Rae Jespen – Valerie and the boy sing a duet together about the good times they see themselves together in the future.

    17. Too Close by Alex Clare – Just then, another boy appears to confront Valerie about his love for her and he sings her this song.

    18. As Long As You Love Me by Justin Bieber – Another boy appears to proclaim his love to Valerie.

    19. Wild Ones by Flo Rida and Sia – Valerie ends up choosing one of the boys and they sing together about making a new home together.

    20. Home by Phillip Phillips – The boy and Valerie go make a new home for themselves.

  • Change in Tune

    Lyrics are starting to lean towards sticking together, forgiveness, and “home”.

    In Fun’s We Are Young, they sing, “I know you’re trying to forget…I’m trying hard to take it back…I’ll carry you home.” In Phillip Phillips’ Home, he sings, “Don’t pay no mind to the demons, they fill you with fear….just know you’re not alone, cause I’m going to make this place your home.” Florence and the Machine sings in Shake it Out, “Every demon wants his pound of flesh…and it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back, so shake him off.” Mumford and Son’s I Will Wait sings, “You forgave and I won’t forget …now in some way, shake the excess.”

    In Gym Class Heroes’ Stereo Hearts, Travie McCoy sings, “Holding grudges over love is ancient artifacts,” and in A** Back Home (Panic City Remix by Gym Class Heroes Featuring Neon Hitch) they sing, “We put the us in trust, baby.” In Justin Bieber’s As Long As You Love Me, Big Sean sings, “Us, trust…a couple of things I can’t spell without ‘u’,” and continues with, “The grass ain’t always greener on the other side, It’s green where you water it. So I know we got issues baby, but I’d rather work on this with you than to go ahead and start with someone new.”

    I ended up using some of these songs on a “jukebox musical” compilation I made. Zac Parsons has a great review of Fun: Some Nights that you might also find interesting.

  • How to Host a Website Using a Laptop and a 3G Connection

    Web hosting is best in a redundant, highly scalable, and dependable environment like at 1and1 or Bluehost, but I wondered how successful the other end of that spectrum would be. I didn’t know if a smart phone was capable of hosting a web site, but I knew that there’s not much difference between a laptop and a server besides the mobility. I realize that not all laptops are mobile and that many people use them as desktop replacements, but this article focuses on how you would take a website mobile using a 3G connection.

  • Books are the New Business Cards

    Denis Papathanasiou’s “A practical guide to selling ebooks online” on Hacker news, which reminded me about a report I compiled, but never published online. You may remember me running a local marketing meetup in Indianapolis. The content was posted on the board there, but since I stepped down, that meetup has since disbanded and the content is no longer available. This is my attempt at reposting it here to help people as Denis has helped people.

    How to Publish on the Kindle and it’s new role as a Marketing Platform

    Before I get into how you can publish your own book online or off, I wanted to first explain why you might want to do that. On September 18, 2012, Ryan Holiday wrote a piece in Fast Company called, “Why Books Are the Ultimate New Business Card,”  in which he states, “that publishing a book is less about sales and much more about creating a brand.” Susan Payton President, Egg Marketing & Communications, was way ahead of him as one of her ideas from her article on January 12, 2012, “Use Internet Marketing to Become an Expert“, states:

    Write a book. I’m the first one to tell you that not every author makes enough to retire from book writing (or even to go on vacation). But there’s still an aura of accomplishment for those who take the time to write one. It doesn’t have to be a bestseller, or even released by a big publishing house. Simply writing a book and letting people know can do wonders for your status as an expert. If you don’t want to go through the pain of pitching your book to a publishing house, or even self-publishing in print, take advantage of Kindle’s Direct Publishing service.

    And here’s what Seth Godin, permission marketer, had to say in The Business Insider article, “If You’re An Average Worker, You’re Going Straight to the Bottom”, on January 19, 2012:

    Instead of waiting around for someone to tell you that you matter, take your career into your own hands. In other words, don’t wait for someone else to pick you and pick yourself! If you have a book, you don’t need a publisher to approve you, you can publish it yourself. It’s no longer about waiting for some big corporation to choose you. We’ve arrived at an age where you choose yourself.

    And here James Altucher, author and entrepreneur, talks about “Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book” on Tech Crunch on January 28th, 2012:

    If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties…You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an “About” button.

    An book (or ebook) can help you a lot to establish itself as a reference on the subject. First, because writing an eBook and organize it as a guide requires much research and knowledge on the subject. After blogs because usually scattered contents cover, ideal for those already familiar with the blog and the subject, while a beginner in the subject needs a logical sequence of learning. The book is still a great way to share knowledge and although it takes more time and research, there is little to no financial involvement in the process. You can start today and post to your own website, using social media to spread the message. You might already know how to blog, but you might not know how to turn that blog content into a book. Next we’ll talk about some tools to do that.

    Kindle Digital Publishing

    There are two major eBook platforms: Amazon.com and iTunes. You can write your book for both or either, but while we’ll have some options for publishing to iTunes, this will mostly focus on creating ebooks for Amazon.com. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and it allows authors to self-publish their Word, PDF, or ebook formats to the Kindle marketplace on Amazon.com.

    Tips on How to Format a Kindle eBook

    If you know basic HTML, you can format a text or Word document for the Kindle. In Word, save as “Web Page (Filtered).” The filtered mode will remove much of the extra Word-specific code that is usually included in files saved with the regular ”Web Page” option. The Kindle converter will try its best to process a .doc or .pdf, but the results will be always worse than basic HTML. So don’t bother. Just give it what it wants. Give it HTML.

    Every paragraph is wrapped in standard < p >…< / p > tags. In the program, TextMate, you can use the “Wrap Each Selected Line in Open/Close Tag” command. To force a page break, use < mbp : pagebreak / >. There’s another way to do it using astyle=”page-break-before: always;” within an enclosing paragraph tag, but < mbp : pagebreak / > is easier to find when looking through your file.

    Links and anchors work just as you’d suspect, which makes it quick to build a table of contents, or link back to a webpage. In addition, you’ll want to place a special anchor where the text starts: < a name = ” start ” / >. When the book is first opened, it will jump to this spot. This lets you skip over title pages.

    Once your ebook is formatted correctly, go to KDP and upload it to your bookshelf, set the price, and decide on whether or not you want it to be part of the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

    About the Kindle Owners Lending Library

    The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) is a collection of books with US territory rights that US Amazon Prime members can borrow for free once a month, with no due dates. The “Lending for Kindle” feature allows readers to lend digital books they have purchased through the Kindle Store on Amazon.com to their friends and family. Enrollment in Kindle Book Lending will allow users to lend your book after purchasing to their friends and family for a duration of 14 days. For full details, review the Kindle Book Lending Program. The Kindle Book Lending feature allows users to lend digital books they have purchased through the Kindle Store to their friends and family. Each book may be lent once for a duration of 14 days and will not be readable by the lender during the loan period.

    Print-On-Demand Publishing from Amazon

    If you want a paper copy of your book, you’ll want to use a service like Createspace from Amazon. One reviewer said, “I used createspace because they are owned by Amazon and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. For my first book I did this by myself, for my second book, for a small fee, I hired Alexander Becker to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF that I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on font (sans serif instead of serif) and was extremely helpful.” If you think, “I don’t have time, I’m running a business.” As James Altucher said, “Entrepreneurs make time. And they have the ideas so, again, at the very least you can use elance.com to hire a ghostwriter.” As an alternative to Creatspace, you might also consider Lightning Source – “the fastest, most economical way to get your books into the hands of an eager buyer.”

    Tools to Write Your Book and Curate Your Blog Posts

    If you need more than Word to help you keep your writing organized, consider Scrivener software. Scrivener is software that allows you to compose, change layout, and export to mobi, epub, PDF, Doc, and a bunch of other formats. “Scrivener is a word-processing program designed for writers. Scrivener provides a management system for documents, notes and metadata. This allows the user to keep track of notes, concepts, research and whole documents for reference (documents including text, images, PDF, audio, video, web pages, etc.). After writing a piece of text the user may export it to a full-fledged word processor for formatting.

    Features include a corkboard, an outliner, iPhoto-like full-screen mode and “snapshots” (the ability to save a copy of a particular document prior to any drastic changes). Because of its breadth of interfaces and features, it has positioned itself not only as a word processor, but as a literary “project management tool”, and includes many user-interface features that resemble Apple’s software-development environment Xcode. Keith Blount created the program as a tool to help him write the “big novel”, allowing him to keep track of all of his ideas and research. It is his first application, built mostly on libraries and features of Mac OS X from v10.4 onward. In 2011 a Windows version of the software was released. It is written and maintained by Lee Powell. A Linux version of Scrivener remains available in beta form.”

    Publishing to the iBook for iTunes

    So far I’ve posted links that focus on publishing on Amazon, but iTunes is another huge marketplace that you can publish to. According to Gizmodo, iTunes (for iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad) take ePUB format only, so you’ll have to use a program like Scrivener or Calibre to create or convert your ebook, respectively. In this video, Terry White shows you the steps you need to take to create an iBook for the iPad or ePUB for just about any other ebook reader out there using the NEW InDesign CS5! You can actually download this iBook for free.

    Two Free Multiplatform Tools to make iBooks

    eCub: A lightweight ePub publisher to create iBooks available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris platform. Some of the features are:

    • creates unencrypted ePub files from text or XHTML files;
    • allows editing of the text or XHTML files with a simple internal editor or designated external editors;
    • helps to create a simple cover design image;
    • optionally creates title, content and cover pages;
    • can be run from the command line as part of a build script;
    • can convert the book content to audio files (WAV or MP3).

    Sigil: Describes itself as a WYSIWYG ebook editor. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Some of the features are:

    • WYSIWYG editing;
    • Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View;
    • Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200) with full descriptions for each;
    • Table Of Contents editor;
    • Multi-level TOC support;
    • Currently imports TXT, HTML and ePub files; more will be added with time;
    • Currently exports ePub and SGF (Sigil native format); more will be added with time.

    Summary

    I hope that helps give you some inspiration and resources for extending your brand and/or your ideas to the world through these new and exciting tools we now have available at our fingertips.

  • Top Posts and Keywords for November 2012

    In this 667th post, I discuss my top content, keywords, and income for this website.

    Occasionally I’ll do an analysis of my blog content and share it out for others to learn from what I’m doing. Dukeo does this with his monthly blogging stats so I’m thinking about doing it more often, maybe monthly. We’ll see. Here is my attempt at a monthly blog statistics analysis based on data from Google Analytics, Amazon Associates, and Google Adsense.

    The spike in traffic you see at the right edge of the image below is from combining all posts from the old Watershawl site into this. Watershawl was averaging over 5000 unique visitors a month with two posts, “Syncing Outlook Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks with Android Using Gmail” and “How to Auto-Forward Text Messages to Email in Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and the iPhone” getting around 2000 unique visitors each. No doubt these will be the top 2 posts next month. Interestingly, they were originally written for my Geek Hand site, but were folded into Watershawl earlier this year so this is actually their second move. I’ve got a redirection plugin up on Watershawl to redirect traffic to Erich Stauffer for now.

    Total visits was 1,544 with 1,417 being unique. There were 2,383 pageviews with 1.54 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 74.61%, which is really high. Most people used Internet Explorer (28%) followed by Chrome (24%), Safari (19.5%), Firefox (18%). Most visits were from the United States with most visitors being from California (128) followed by New York (94), Florida (72), Illinois (61), and Texas (58). Indiana had 38 for comparison. Judging by the use of Internet Explorer, the high content of Florida visitors, and the penchant for Erich Stauffer figurines, I’d say I have an older visitor base that is not interested in what I want to talk about most of the time (more on that later).

    Top 10 Content

    Of my Top Posts of 2011, the only one to fall out of the top 10 is “How to Delete a Digg Submission“. Regardless of how much I try to write about business, technology, and entrepreneurship, “the organism will do whatever it pleases.” My response to that in the past has been to ‘write more of what people are already looking at’ and sometimes I end up creating an entirely new site out of my most popular content, as I wrote about in Analyzing Actions in September of 2009. One post on Youtube Query String Parameters was turned into an entire site, which was later sold for $145. I did the same thing with the How to Stay Alert and Focused post. I’ve since made a new ‘query strings’-type site called Map Strings that gets most of it’s traffic from How To Run Google Maps On the Kindle Fire EDIT: moved the site here starting on 1/6/2013.

    Top 10 Keywords

    • erich stauffer (68)
    • collegeclub.com (31)
    • erich stauffer figurines (17)
    • what happened to collegeclub (14)
    • eric stauffer figurines (12)
    • erich stauffer figurine prices (11)
    • mexican cat (11)
    • arnart porcelain marks (9)
    • collegeclub email (8)
    • erich stauffer figurine (8)
    As you might expect due to the domain name, I get a lot of traffic for the keyword and variations of, “Erich Stauffer”, the Arnart Import’s fake Hummel figurine artist I was named after. Second to that, people are still crazy about Collegeclub.com and seem to still wonder where all of their stuff went when it went belly up. Like them, I was interested so I did some research, found out, and shared it on my blog. I just didn’t think that all these years later it would still be some of my most popular blog posts. The “mexican cat” gets linked to a post called “Smarty Cat” through Google Image Search and that is also the reason “My CEO Heroes” ranks well – people are searching for an image of Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks.

    Top 10 Sources

    • google.com (89)
    • facebook.com (19)
    • qian8ao.com (11)
    • google.co.uk (10)
    • dogpile.com (4)
    • google.ca (4)
    • m.facebook.com (4)
    • google.com.br (3)
    • iphoneunity.com (3)
    • answers.yahoo.com (2)

    I have a pretty active Twitter account so it’s somewhat of a surprise to me to not see Twitter in the referral list, but I did get one (1) referral from Twitter, ranking it at #49. Qian8ao is a “Free Expense-Tracking Application and Personal Finance Community” in China. I’m not sure what link they have pointing to me as Google Analytics can’t resolve it properly and my go-to Google searches aren’t revealing anything, but I’m guessing that it’s not page visits, but a hot-linked image that is causing the count. I post links to this page via my Erich Stauffer Figurines page and the Erich Stauffer page. I have used Yahoo Answers as part of my SEO process successfully for a number of years.

    Income Stats

    • Amazon Associates Affiliate Program: 72 Clicks – 0 Items Ordered – 0 Items Shipped – 0 Advertising Fees
    • Google Adsense: $12.74 Estimate

     

  • Bet Your Apps on Google Glass

    How Augmented Reality Will Usurp the Smartphone

    On May 1, 2012 I wrote a post about how Google Goggles would be the next big thing after smartphones and on November 22, 2012, Business Insider wrote in The End of The Smartphone Era is Coming about how Google Glass will be the new, default way people communicate, usurping the current cellphone. Nicholas Carlson writes, “Something like Google Glass or whatever Microsoft is working on could end up replacing the smartphone as the dominant way people access the Internet and connect to each other.”

    While Google Glass uses a tiny screen displayed on the inside of glasses, Microsoft is working on augmented reality, where data and illustrations overlay the actual world around you. And while these still new technologies are being built around wearable glasses, they will enevitably get smaller and be embedded in contact lenses. The US military is already developing augmented reality contact lenses as seen in Mission Impossible 4, Ghost Protocol.

    I’ve always thought that anything we see in the movies is just a pre-cursor for real life (but we’re all still waiting on flying cars and cold fusion). The one I think about the most is the smartphone used in The Saint. It was a bar phone that flipped open like a mini-laptop that had Internet access. The movie came out in 1997 when the Internet still meant dial-up for most people and cell phones had yet to become ubiquitous. It took ten years, but by 2007 I had a better phone than Val Kilmer, but then Tom Cruise had to go and up me with his augmented reality contact lenses. I guess I’ll have to wait for Microsoft or Google to catch me up in another 10 years.

    UPDATE 12/17/2012: Scientists in Belgium have taken a crucial step toward building screens into contact lenses, “Jelle De Smet and a team of researchers at Ghent University built an LCD screen in a curved contact lens.”

  • Indianapolis Video Surveillance Analysts

    The other day I was in downtown Indianapolis at the Circle Center Mall where I noticed two video surveillance cameras in one of the parking garage escalator areas. This would not have been a big deal, but all one camera was doing was looking at the other. It seemed like perfect fodder for Fail Blog, whose ironic content fits perfectly with Roman poet Juvenal’s famous line, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–8), which is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” One video surveillance camera had probably just replaced the other without the former being removed, but it still goes to show the value of a good Indianapolis video surveillance analyst.

    Who Will Watch the WatchersThe video surveillance system you choose to purchase and/or update could be purchased on Amazon.com or from a variety of different resellers, but how do you know if it will give you the results you need and how do you know if your IT system can support it? That’s the value that AllThingsIT provides with their Indianapolis video surveillance design services. They have been providing IT networking and video surveillance system support for over 30 years. Their new “Safe Small Towns” initiative is focused on helping small towns and municipality police and fire departments develop and implement video surveillance cameras that give them evidence they can use in court.

    As an IT business analyst myself, I can understand the value of working with a company like AllThingsIT for Indianapolis network management because video surveillance technology changes fast and there are hundreds of different cameras out there – each with their different light sensors and lens types that create a myriad of features. AllThingsIT has the tools to create a turn-key video surveillance solution for your organization that can be proven effective before it’s even installed. If you’re in the market for a new video surveillance system or are looking to upgrade, contact AllThingsIT at 317-755-0200.

  • One Dozen Rubber Ducky Ducks

    This past week I sold One Dozen Rubber Duckie Ducky Ducks in a nativity scene (set includes: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, 3 wise men, angel, lamb, cow, donkey and camel) without ever linking to the product. It would make most sense if it came from this website since I talk a lot about Erich Stauffer figurines and other collectibles, but it wasn’t. It was clicked on through my site on Coby Kyros Tablets. That’s right. Someone looking for information on Android tablets bought a nativity scene made of rubber duckies. But that’s not all. I have a site that exclusively promotes learning sets like science experiements for kids and yet MID Tablets sold a child’s microscope. Who did sell a Coby Kyros tablet? A page about technology consulting. This goes to show, it pays to post (and post often) #myBody. Here are some of the systems I use to use affiliate marketing to help transition to a full-fledged ecommerce company or “etailer“.

    Systems for eCommerce/Affiliate Marketing

    To run a successful online business probably requires some systems so I’ve been developing some and thought I’d share:

    • Review Amazon Best Seller lists and curate new items to add to your site(s) – (Daily)
    • Review sold items that were not linked to and create posts for them accordingly – (Daily)
    • Review Google Analytic trends for top content and keywords on your site – (Monthly)
    • Review Amazon sales clicked, but not sold* – (Monthly)
    • Review Google Adsense reports for trends – (Weekly)

    Posting Routines

    • Post SEO optimized title and META description, reviews, a picture, and some original content (I use WordPress SEO by Yoast)
    • Install “Social” plugin by MailChimp + “Twitter Tools” to not only display tweets, but post to Twitter
    • Post also on Google+ and Facebook (and any other social network you can systematically stay engaged in)

    How to Read the Amazon Associates Orders Report

    *When I download the Orders report, I get a view of what people are clicking on, but not buying. I think the “Product Link Clicks” is a better metric for us to track since we can’t control what they do once they are on Amazon, but let’s read what Amazon Associates says:

    Orders Reports display number of clicks for each product via a Product Link or add-to-cart button, number of orders placed through the Product Link, and the resulting Product link conversion. You can also see other items that were ordered after customers clicked through to other Amazon pages.

  • Indianapolis Video Surveillance Systems

    We recently learned about a video surveillance vendor, AllThingsIT, who provides video surveillance systems and cameras to small towns, municipalities, and businesses in and around Indiana under the brand, “Safe Small Towns”. The idea is that video surveillance systems can help keep small towns safe by providing business owners and police departments with the evidence they need to find and convict criminals. They call this, “civic surveillance”.

    Safe Small Towns’ website talks a lot about educating the consumer on how camera and other technology works and about providing “performance-based work statements”. They seem to really be up on results-based solutions and the primary way they do this is through JPEG 2000 technology, which takes multiple still images to make a video instead of traditional interlaced video. However, the primary value AllThingsIT brings to the table is in their knowledge of not just how to choose the right video camera solution, but how to integrate that solution into your existing computer network.

    AllThingsIT has provided IT network support, video systems, and computer monitoring for a wide variety of corporate and government entities over the years. Their experience with servers, networks, video cameras, and monitoring makes them the ideal video surveillance vendor in the Indianapolis area. Safe Small Towns takes everything AllThingsIT has done with video and wrapped it up into a comprehensive package suitable for small towns, police departments, and other industries in order to offer them specific solutions for their video surveillance needs.