I'd like to use iOS to post on my users's facebook walls/tickers/news feeds. I learned that opengraph can be very specific about the actions users take inside my app, and I'd like to integrate them into my project.
I think I realize now I am going to need my own server running for opengraph actions to work ,right? or is this not a must? from what I understand, the server supplies the basic data to facebook for the post, like image, main text, secondary text etc...
Is my server needed just to supply the facebook posts' data? Is my server called everytime a facebook page is loaded with my app's contents? Or is it done only once, and facebook is copying the posts' content into facebook's servers?
What happens if my servers is not responsive etc?
The short answer: yes, you probably need a server.
The longer answer:
The facebook documentation on Open Graph is much better than what I can fit here. If you have not already, check out this page and its links: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.
A published action on facebook is a tuple { user, action, object }. The types of actions and objects are defined in the facebook developer application (developers.facebook.com/apps).
The content of the post is generated by your iOS client. The post has data that references the action by name and the object by its URL.
The individual objects that your app defines are typically represented by pages on your web server. These pages are scraped by Facebook to extract metadata that defines the object, including images and text. I do not know of safe assumptions you can make about when the object's page will be scraped.
It is possible to create sample objects when you are editing your object types (developers.facebook.com/apps, create or edit one of your apps, "Edit Open Graph", "Add Sample Data"). However, because these are intended for experimentation, they are fairly limited in what you can do with them.
Related
Instead of creating a dynamic link inside the iOS app, is it possible to create dynamic links directly from the Admin SDK? For example, I listen for the creation of a document in the Admin SDK, and then create a dynamic link with its path.
Thanks!
As you can see from the Firebase Admin SDK documentation, working with Dynamic Links is not among the many things it can do.
It's possible #ken, Firebase's docs just refer to it as "Email Action Links". Now it depends on what you want to do with the dynamic links...
If your use case falls under one of these 3 generic categories (email password links / sign in / reset links), it's done for you.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/email-action-links
If you want to go beyond that, the API specifies an ActionCodeSettings field which has the parameter dynamicLinkDomain. You may be able to send a dynamic link like this anyway, even if its not explicitly handled for you.
Alternatively, you could make the dynamic links manually via this method, and write the link out in your Admin SDK area (whether thats Node.js or where-ever you're listening for document creation).
https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create-manually
You can do this but not directly from the Admin API. BigMcLargeHuge's answer is correct, but the documentation page from that answer doesn't explain how to generate short links (which is often more desirable).
The documentation that includes short links is here:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/rest
You just have to make a post request.
I'm building a service where people gets notified (mails) when they follow a link with the format www.domain.com/this_is_a_hash. The people that use this server can share this link on different places like, twitter, tumblr, facebook and more...
The main problem I'm having is that as soon as the link is shared on any of this platforms a lot of request to the www.domain.com/this_is_a_hash are coming to my server. The problem with this is that each time one of this requests hits my server a notification is sent to the owner of the this_is_a_hash, and of course this is not what I want. I just want to get notifications when real people is going into this resource.
I found a very interesting article here that talks about the huge amount of request a server receives when posting to twitter...
So what I need is to avoid search engines to hit the "resource" url... the www.mydomain.com/this_is_a_hash
Any idea? I'm using rails 3.
Thanks!
If you don’t want these pages to be indexed by search engines, you could use a robots.txt to block these URLs.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
(That would block all URLs for all user-agents. You may want to add a folder to block only those URLs inside of it. Or you could add the forbidden URLs dynamically as they get created, however, some bots might cache the robots.txt for some time so they might not recognize that a new URL should be blocked, too.)
It would, of course, only hold back those bots that are polite enough to follow the rules of your robots.txt.
If your users would copy&paste HTML, you could make use of the nofollow link relationship type:
cute cat
However, this would not be very effective, as even some of those search engines that support this link type still visit the pages.
Alternatively, you could require JavaScript to be able to click the link, but that’s not very elegant, of course.
But I assume they only copy&paste the plain URL, so this wouldn’t work anyway.
So the only chance you have is to decide if it’s a bot or a human after the link got clicked.
You could check for user-agents. You could analyze the behaviour on the page (e.g. how long it takes for the first click). Or, if it’s really important to you, you could force the users to enter a CAPTCHA to be able to see the page content at all. Of course you can never catch all bots with such methods.
You could use analytics on the pages, like Piwik. They try to differentiate users from bots, so that only users show up in the statistics. I’m sure most analytics tools provide an API that would allow sending out mails for each registered visit.
I would like to monitor users' page visits and clicks in my Rails app to make recommendations. My questions are:
Is there a Rails gem for this, or Google Analytics is the standard? If latter is true, then how should I link a page visit to a particular user profile?
It is typical in Rails to have a section in application.html.erb, which is shared for all pages. If I add Google Analytics pageview tracking code to in application.html.erb, will it be able to track all individual pages?
There are other ways, but the vast majority probably use Google Analytics. Several gems exist that help you integrate with GA to get at the data. See here: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/Web_Analytics.
Based on your first question, it seems you may want more insight than GA can provide. I've used ClickTale (http://www.clicktale.com) and Woopra (http://www.woopra.com) before, to good effect. This article lists several other alternatives, too - notice the high marks for Clicky: http://imimpact.com/web-stats-alternatives-to-google-analytics/.
Google Analytics (and almost all of these others) will take care of your second question automatically whenever the user loads a new page, since it keyed by URL. That means that, although you put the GA script code in a single place, each unique page is tracked individually.
If you have AJAX requests that change that page without changing the URL, you'll need to dig in to the GA script API. Essentially you'll need to push a new url (possibly with a # in it) whenever you want to track an AJAX-driven link/button click. See here: http://davidwalsh.name/ajax-analytics
I am biased, but I would recommend checking out impressionist, if you need to integrate the page views into the app in real-time. With analytics you will always have some lag time and you are also relying on an external dependency. Impressionist is good if you need this kind of control, but if you are just looking for simple metrics and don't need to pull them into the app, then analytics is probably the way to go.
Check out Ahoy, at https://github.com/ankane/ahoy. With just a few lines of code in your app, you can track page views and tie them to user accounts.
You can further customize Ahoy to track custom events, both the client (with JavaScript) and server.
Ahoy does not depend on any third-party services.
I am creating an ios app that needs to download a html page and extract some information from it. To get to the page I also need to login. I have looked everywhere for some code on how to login to a site using the cocoa framework, but every answer I see only seems to answer half the question. Here is the login site: romres.ist-asp.com. I need some code for writing something in the first field (the other two are left blank), then submit the form and then I need to be able to see the next page. I believe apps like Facebook should use som of the same technology, where you log in to a facebook and then you can see the contents of your profile.
Basically what you want to do is called scraping.
Scraping is really easy for sites that don't require authentication, but in your case what you should do is to inspect the POST request being made when logging in the site your interested in (try to understand of the service respond) and the POST request made, when already logged in, to retrieve each page.
The purpose of all of this is to have later the possibility to simulate regular HTTP requests that should came from a browser via code.
If you have any doubt ask in the comments.
Recently search engines have been able to page dynamic content on social networking sites. I would like to understand how this is done. Are there static pages created by a site like Facebook that update semi frequently. Does Google attempt to store every possible user name?
As I understand it, a page like www.facebook.com/username, is not an actual file stored on disk but is shorthand for a query like: select username from users and display the information on the page. How does Google know about every user, this gets even more complicated when things like tweets are involved.
EDIT: I guess I didn't really ask what I wanted to know about. Do I need to be as big as twitter or facebook in order for google to make special ways to crawl my site? Will google automatically find my users profiles if I allow anyone to view them? If not what do I have to do to make that work?
In the case of tweets in particular, Google isn't 'crawling' for them in the traditional sense; they've integrated with Twitter to provide the search results in real-time.
In the more general case of your question, dynamic content is not new to Facebook or Twitter, though it may seem to be. Google crawls a URL; the URL provides HTML data; Google indexes it. Whether it's a dynamic query that's rendering the page, or whether it's a cache of static HTML, makes little difference to the indexing process in theory. In practice, there's a lot more to it (see Michael B's comment below.)
And see Vartec's succinct post on how Google might find all those public Facebook profiles without actually logging in and poking around FB.
OK, that was vastly oversimplified, but let's see what else people have to say..
As far as I know Google isn't able to read and store the actual contents of profiles, because the Google bot doesn't have a Facebook account, and it would be a huge privacy breach.
The bot works by hitting facebook.com and then following every link it can find. Whatever content it sees on the page it hits, it stores. So even if it follows a dynamic url like www.facebook.com/username, it will just remember whatever it saw when it went there. Hopefully in that particular case, it isn't all the private data of said user.
Additionally, facebook can and does provide special instructions that search bots can follow, so that google results don't include a bunch of login pages.
profiles can be linked from outside;
site may provide sitemap