Is there a way, or a gem, that can send information to Google Analytics without the page load occurring?
I have a URL shortener, that redirects to the original URL (obviously), but I would like to track who clicked it.
Is there a way to send Google Analytics the request/headers or whatever it needs, from the controller, just prior to the redirect, without them having to actually load a page?
You can use the measurement protocol to do that. There may be a gem that wraps the functionality, but it's pretty basic as is. Essentially, you're just sending sending HTTP hits to the GA servers with your data in the query parameters.
Here are the docs:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/
Related
I am making an api backend that makes use of another api,for example Twitter. (Please note the actual api isn't twitter but I am using them as an example).
Let's say that Twitter has a limit on the number of calls that can be made to their api and above this limit, it starts to charge my credit card. This is why it is very important to me that no one misuses my api.
I want to prevent people from looking at my frontend code and seeing which endpoint it hits, because if a malicious person were to do this, I would very quickly go over the limit and have to pay $$$.
My frontend code uses a get call to mybackend.com/twitter/api
Is it enough to simply add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to my backend?
headers['Access-Control-Allow-Origin'] = 'myfrontend.com'
The reason I am asking this is because I noticed that typing mybackend.com/twitter/api directly into the browser worked, which is not what I would expect if I had access-control-allow-origin set to a specific website.
Am I doing something wrong? How do I prevent someone from simply writing a script to hit my backend since it is clear that just typing it into the url of my browser works, despite me having an access-control-allow-origin header.
There are two possible solutions for your problem. You can try to implement a request signature for your API, to know exactly the source of it on your backend. You can take a look on how this works here.
The second option, and for me, a one witch fits your problem better, is to set up a Denial of service approach on your server Load Balancer to prevent multiple requests from a same origin, and so, don't let those kind of malicious requests hit your backend.
Hoping someone has some knowledge on this one. I have a system which allows users to post to facebook or to send a link via email using an ESP called dotMailer. When creating the wall post / email campaign however, both Facebook and dotMailer 'test' the URL embedded in the content to see if it's valid.
I am storing a viewed_on date for the URLs, and as such I want to be able to ignore the HTTP requests by Facebook and dotMailer rather than storing the viewed_on date that they trigger by hitting the URL.
In terms of what I've tried / won't work:
IP Filtering - cannot rely on IP being same each time
Time-based delay - depends on how quickly dotMailer/Facebook processes the requests, so cannot rely on this
Thanks!
I'm a dev with dotMailer - for us, you can rely on the request coming from one of two different places: 94.143.104.0/21, 80.249.97.113, or 80.249.97.114. With Facebook, you can simply check the UserAgent. We use an IE useragent, because a surprising amount of sites behave differently when presented with a non-standard useragent and thus make link checking less reliable.
We've got a great forum, so stop on by if you have any more questions! https://support.dotmailer.com/forums
I'm having some issues with Google Analytics URL parameters. Prviously I've built URLs with the Google Analytics URL Builder. these have enabled me to track where visitors to my site have been coming from, how successful various marketing campaigns have been etc.
Recently, I've started using another tag in the URL, one which has nothing to do with Google Analytics, but acts to alter the telephone number on my site when the visitor arrives on it. For example, I'll add &ctcc=adwords onto the end of my tracking URL, and a specified phone number will appear on my site when the user comes through so I can track how many calls my adwords spend has generated.
However, when I've been using this ctcc code, Google Analytics no longer seems to be tracking the traffic numbers to my site :(
Any idea how I can incorporate the two parameters into the URl, and ensure that they both work as expected?
Thanks in advance
It looks like this is a problem with how your server is redirecting traffic with a ctcc query parameter. Look at the following request and its response headers:
So the ctcc parameter is used in some server side tracking (as best as I can tell), and the server is set up to redirect & strip ctcc whenever it gets a request with ctcc. Not being familiar with the system in use, I can't provide details, but you need to reconfigure the redirects to stop changing & into ;. It's the replacement of ampersands with semicolons that is messing up your GA data.
So I'm writing a post on my wall and type a URL into the main body of the post. As soon as I finish the URL, Facebook creates a little section underneath which has the title, description, and an image from the url I typed.
Without getting too indepth, how is this done and what is the best way of make something similar myself?
jQuery (or some other framework that lets you do Ajax easily) to communicate between browser client and webserver
PHP/ASP.NET/Python (or some other scripting framework on the backend) to fetch the url
Facebook also has a meta data specification you might be interested in, to let developers further define what gets shown in a Facebook page.
I believe Facebook is written in PHP. And PHP does this easily.
FOpen can be used to access files on other sites. There are other functions but this will get you started. Then it's a matter of parsing the html you get from the url to get what you want.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php
You have a couple choices. You can fetch it using Ajax from the client; or you can fetch it from your server.
If doing it from your server in asp.net then you need to use HttpWebRequest.
FB does an asynchronous JavaScript call to fetch that data without reloading the window you're on. Lookup ajax and libraries like jquery do this: http://api.jquery.com/category/ajax/
is it possible to submit forms with yahoo pipes?
i basically need to log in somewhere, and get some stuff from the members area of a website into a feed.
Although this is not exactly programming related... I guess it is close enough.
No, logging into somewhere is impossible with Yahoo Pipes. Sending the username/password isn't even the only problem here.
The real problem is that most, if not all, web sites that require a log-in depend on a session cookie or something similar. Yahoo pipes can do a GET request, and that's about it. Even if it was possible to send your user name/password in the URL, you would not be able to use the session cookie, so subsequent requests would fail.
So... If you have access to a hosted web site somewhere: Write a small proxy script (in PHP or whatever is available) that does the login and fetches the data. Let Yahoo pipes read from your proxy page. But if you are that far, you can just as well produce RSS format right away. ;-)
I did a pipe that can log in and extract info. is working ok on a simple web form using POST.