I'm looking for different techniques to capture the response of a form as successful/unsuccessful. I'm automatically filling forms on other websites and I want to show the result on my own website.
What are some good techniques to accomplish this?
I thought about the following general techniques:
GET-method, looking at URL (depends if website shows response in the URL);
Get the redirect page and use text-analysis;
API (depends on website);
Related
I have a website where the URLs have some tracking parameters that do not affect the page that is displayed i.e. the URL is of the form http://mywebsite.com/page1?tracking1=aaa&tracking2=bbb and 'tracking1' and 'tracking2' are just tracking parameters used for some other purpose and do no determine the page that is displayed. The page that is displayed is always 'http://mywebsite.com/page1' irrespective of the values of these tracking parameters.
I have included the facebook like button on my website pages and facebook treats each of these URLs, including the tracking parameters, as separate pages. I'm not able to get facebook to ignore these tracking parameters and just consider the URL without tracking parameters as a page. So, I'm storing my own like count against the actual URL (when I get a callback on the like action) and displaying it next to the like button.
Is displaying own like count next to facebook like button against their usage policy? Is there a better way to do this?
Is there any particular functional reason you're using GET (ie URL) variables to store your tracking?
If you can push them into POST instead, or use cookies or sessions for your tracking, you can simplify your URLs and Facebook should treat it as a single page.
If you have to use GET due to, for example, the links coming from external websites, you could use a pass-through URL to do your tracking, before forwarding to the main page. ie someone clicks the link to redirect?tracking1=aaa&tracking2=bbb&page=page1
And redirect, as you may have guessed, does what you need to do with your tracking before forwarding the user on to page1.
These days modern sites are becoming more and more service oriented like facebook/gmail.
A main page is loaded and then with ajax requests it calls all sorts of data and adds them on the site. This is also something that is promoted on ASP.NET MVC4 with the Web API.
So now lets say we want to create a product category page for a eshop. It has come to my understanding that the way to go with this implementation is to create a nice layout and create a Web API that will retrieve all data on request.
So we'll have a url like
/api/Products
that will retun a json with all of our products and then we can build up with this api by adding filters/paging maybe (/api/Products?sort-by=name) or anything else that will return the filtered json and we can pass with ajax requests back and forth offering the user an excellent experience.
My question with this now is what happens with SEO.
So a few years ago without onepage ajax/service oriented sites we would have
http://website.com/apples/
http://website.com/apples/2/
that would load the list of the apples with pagination.
Now the site would be
http://website.com/apples/
however it wouldn't load the apples instantly but load a blank page and call the service
/api/apples
that would return a json and then load the data on the site.
I read this article at Google https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/html-snapshot which didn't convince me. I really don't want to load the service behind and then string replace.
It is possible to have the
http://website.com/apples/
that would call the service
/api/apples
and load the data and be at the same time Google friendly?
You have a couple of options. Either you can use HTML5 pushState to update the URL, but then you also will need to create a version of your site that works without JavaScript turned on.
Another option is to use Googles AJAX Crawling specification. I don't know which search providers that currently supports it, but should be a good way to at least get into Googles search results.
I have a jsp form which takes in user details. On submit button it goes to a jsp page where the details are entered into the database. But before that I would like to check if the username is available as soon as the user clicks the check availability button. How can this be done?
2 ways:
Just redisplay the same page after submitting the form wherein you conditionally display the validation message. This is rather trivial and already covered in the Hello World example in our Servlets wiki page.
Use Ajax to send an asynchronous HTTP request and manipulate the HTML DOM based on the response of the request. This requires a bit more in depth understanding of how websites really work and what JavaScript is. You can find some concrete examples in How to use Servlets and Ajax?
Use AJAX(Asynchronous Javascript and Xml). Its the best web2.0 technology. You can manipulate DOM based on the answer from server
Hey, so this is one of those questions that seems obvious, and I'm probably going to feel stupid, but here goes:
I'm doing a CodeIgniter site with a search. Think of a Google type input, where you'd search for "white huskies." I have a search results page that takes a URI (MySite.com/dogs/white huskies), and takes the third part, and performs the search on that term. I'd like this to be done in the URI, and no by POST so my users can bookmark results.
The problem I'm having is how to get that search button directed to Mysite.com/dogs/WHATEVER IS IN THE INPUT. How do I get the what is in the input part into the anchor href? I know I could do this with javascript, but I've heard it's bad practice to force people to have javascript for things this small.
Thanks for the help!
Read: Form redirect to URL containing query term? - pure HTML or Django
(asked for Django, but answer fits here too)
You could have an intermediate POST page that collects the form inputs and concatenates them into a valid URL which you can then redirect to. I'm not sure if this is good or bad SEO practice however, but I can't see another way of doing this without some Javascript intervention.
Perhaps you could look at doing the intermediate POST page which takes the values are redirects you to /search/dog/white/huskies, but also have a Javascript equivalent that does this on the fly on the form submit and does a window.location refresh to the same /search/dog/white/huskies?
Just my 2 pennies worth ;)
It is possible to have CodeIgniter work with $_GET variables and URI segments securely.
A work around I have used in the past is to have the search term collected using POST, parse the required URL for use with URI segments and then redirect your user to this page.
$url = 'mysite.com/search/' . urlencode($_POST['query']);
redirect($url);
This shouldn't effect SEO but something like the URL of a search result is unlikely to have any effect on SEO anyway. Clean URLs are only really meant to be used for permanent content. If you're going to be displaying the search term on the page, remember to use xss_clean(), seen a few people make this fatal mistake before.
I'm trying to implement a feature like that where a user inputs a url and when displaying that url I want to have a custom display (an embed object if it's a video from youtube, a thumbnail if it's an image link, title and excerpt of body if it's a normal link).
How can such a feature be realized?
There is a new idea called oEmbed that a few sites support (Flickr, Vimeo and a few others) that addresses this problem. oEmbed site
Otherwise, just check the site against a list of ones you pick and then pull out the relevant bits to construct an embed link.
I liked the idea of oEmbed a lot but unfortunately it doesn't has that much adoption yet.
oohEmbed tries to solve this issue by building oEmbed for many websites.
For the feature to work, it needs the server's interaction where I believe the following scenario is how it works
Assume that we have the site humanzz.com and that it provides such feature
A user enters a url on the humanzz.com's webpage and presses a button like facebooks' preview button
An AJAX call is made to a dedicated page on humanzz.com
humanzz.com does calls the remote website and gets its data
The AJAX call now returns the page's data (oEmbed JSON object)
This involves so much server's overhead.
I really wanted to do it using JavaScript as the server's role was only to bypass "Same Origin Policy"'s restrictions.
oohEmbed allows bypassing the server's step by specifying a callback parameter to oohEmbed so that the JSON object returned is passed to a callback function on your page.
An example illustrating this is as follows
Add a script tag dynamically to your page
< script type="text/javascript" src="http://oohembed.com/oohembed/?url=http%3A//www.amazon.com/Myths-Innovation-Scott-Berkun/dp/0596527055/&callback=myCallBack">< /script>
This would result in executing myCallback(oEmbedJSONObject) which is great.
The problem with that solution is you still have to have a fallback for websites that don't have oEmbed representations.
For the embedded things, I have been using auto_html ( https://github.com/dejan/auto_html) with great success (vimeo, youtube, images) and even added soundcloud myself. But I am still looking for a "thumbnail" generation with an image and text facebook-like.
I guess you have to construct it by yourself by manually parsing the kind of URL you get.
If it is an image url, well then you just have to rescale it and in case the user clicks on it, then handle that by opening the original one somehow.
If it is a link to some youtube video, then you have to take a look at how the embedding of Youtube videos works. You can just copy the code that is provided by Youtube itself, and then exchange the parts with the URL to the video with the URL you got from your user.
I did never implement something like that, but I assume it should work somehow like this.