Google Content Experiments for whole part of the site - ab-testing

I want to run an A/B-test or an experiment for whole part of the site. For example on my /blog/ page, where one variation would have a newsletter form and other variation a free ebook download button.
The problem is that I have to use a full URL path for the experiments, for example /blog/2013/article/1?var=1 and /blog/2013/article/1?var=2 With this method I would need create a new experiment for each blog post. This is impossible.
Any tips on how to approach this?

It's possible, but the documentation is lacking.
When you choose your variation URLs, you need to use relative instead of http://. This let's you use query parameters to define the variations, instead of the full URL. In your example, you would define your original page as:
http: //www.example.com/blog/2013/article/1
and your variation URLs would be ?var=1, var=2, etc. using relative as the option in the dropdown (instead of http:// or https://).
Here's the not-so-clear documentation on using relative URLs for your variations:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2664470?hl=en&ref_topic=1745208
One important thing to remember is that if you're doing it this way, you need to include the content experiment code on every "original" page.
There's also another way to have even more control over serving the variation pages and controlling the experiment using the Content Experiments JavScript API. This is a relatively new feature - you can see the developer documentation about this here:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/experiments

I am not sure this is possible. You might look at a more robust yet simple to use tool like Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely.

Related

Building separate theme for separate urls for Readthedocs

I'm looking for a solution that would allow us to have separate themes in the built docs through rtd, based on urls. The project is github-hosted, so we're using the Webhook integration there for rtd.
Basically, we'd like to have slug.readthedocs.io use a default, and have a custom domain through rtd, i.e. docs.ourdomain.org, use a theme styled to match our site.
on_rtd, it seems, is True whenever rtd builds the docs, so that's likely not useful, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Perhaps multiple Webhooks? Some sphinx magic I haven't discovered yet?
Considering using branches or tags, but that just seems a bit much, and would, I believe, call for multiple project-naming on rtd. Though, again, please correct me if I'm wrong.
At the moment, we've implemented our site theming, and simply let that be in place for both, but ideally, we hope to have the slug.readthedocs.io site be more generic and in-line with the readthedocs.io feel.
At the moment, Read the Docs doesn't support multiple themes for a given repo/branch.
There are at least a couple of approaches available here.
1) Use branches to host alternative docs. Read The Docs has an example project illustrating this approach here:
Read the Docs Sphinx Theme Examples
-- [Github Repository]
2) Use sub-projects.
Neither of these really addresses the use case in my question directly, but they do offer a sort alternative approach to multiple themes.

How to reverse engineer a progressive web app ?

I found this free PWA https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com and now wonder how I could do one such myself.
Since I couldn't find any access to its source code I wondered if it'd be difficult to reverse engineer.
I'm interested in building a PWA with QRCode functionality.
This one was created with AngularJS v1.3.20. You can find the source in your console windows under Sources tab. You can easily beautify the code inside the window to make it readable.
If you want to know how they organized their rest API, the browser network tab will help a lot, just filter by XHR and examine all the call from the front end to be.
The front end is very hard to revers engineer, because most sites are served as minified bundles, so you can't see the original code.
You can however find some other information about what they used to build it, for example in the html source you can see some ng-* tags, which indicates that this is angular, you can also see that body has attribute data-ng-app meaning this is angularjs and so on.
For the QR logic you can see that there are no back end calls, meaning that it is written entirely in the client. I would search for already available solutions for that.

internal links in Lektor's markdown blocks

I want to build a website, maybe similar to a movie database, where every page has, say, actors, director, year (it seems that Lektor can deal very well with such structured metadata), and I am thinking about how to realize internal links between pages on that site.
Say I have a text such as
just like in [his previous movie](link), he shows again ...
then I guess I could use the absolute path of the linked page as link target, but that makes me very inflexible with respect to changing URL structure. Can I somehow just use the ID of the target content?
Or, better yet, can I somehow automatically obtain the title of the linked page?
just like in his previous movie <<link:title>>, he shows again ...
Can I use the standard Markdown blocks for that or would I have to add some handcrafted database lookup logic?
if some contents will be changed in future. I think you can use the databag feature to implement it. you just modify the databg in case changed is need.

Can I embed source files from GitHub on my web page other than Gists?

Context
You can create a Gist on GitHub and embed it on your web page: embedding Gists.
This is an example of a randomly chosen Gist: tap.groovy.
Question
Is embedding also possible with other code files from GitHub, for example with this randomly chosen C# file ICommand.cs which is not a Gist?
You can try https://emgithub.com, which does exactly what you want.
To embed the example file ICommand.cs in your question, you can just add "em" before "github.com" in the address bar, then press Enter.
Then you can get a script tag like this:
<script src="https://emgithub.com/embed-v2.js?target=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fdotnet%2Fcorefx%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2Fsrc%2FSystem.ObjectModel%2Fsrc%2FSystem%2FWindows%2FInput%2FICommand.cs&style=default&type=code&showBorder=on&showLineNumbers=on&showFileMeta=on&showCopy=on"></script>
Note if you simply click Run code snippet in StackOverflow, the copying button at top right corner may not work. Running it outside SO would work fine.
Unlike other websites that do similar work, EmGithub.com is a static site hosted on Github Pages. Fetching target files and highlighting are done on your browser.
Disclosure: I'm the developer of it :)
You can use https://gist-it.appspot.com/:
<script src="http://gist-it.appspot.com/https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/src/System.ObjectModel/src/System/Windows/Input/ICommand.cs"></script>
There's a standard for embedding content from one website in another via a URL, called oEmbed. Unfortunately, GitHub is not a oEmbed provider, i.e. it doesn't support oEmbed for its URLs.
I found a proxy service, Oembed Proxy for GitHub,
which adds oEmbed support for GitHub's code URLs. You pass a GitHub URL as a parameter to the proxy's URL and a resulting URL can be be pasted in another website, assuming that website supports embedding oEmbed links.
Another obstacle is that not every website supports embedding oEmbed URLs. According to the proxy's documentation, notion is one website that supports them. I did some research and looks like it should be possible to add oEmbed support to e.g. wordpress or jekyll.
This answer provides a very limited solution, due to small adoption of oEmbed. I thought it would be worth to spread the word nonetheless.
Another possible service is https://github.com/finom/github-embed. It seems to be unmainted by now for about 2 years, but gist-it seems to be unmaintained for even 6 years. I've tried neither, though.
You can use gistYard
<iframe src="https://gistyard.piyushdev.xyz/emd.html?lang=&from=0&to=&code=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/corefx/master/src/System.ObjectModel/src/System/Windows/Input/ICommand.cs&edit=true&dm=off" width="100%" height="330" frameborder="0"></iframe>
It provides features like changing theme , cutting code directly from raw , edit mode , custom styling and others.

What's the shebang/hashbang (#!) in Facebook and new Twitter URLs for?

I've just noticed that the long, convoluted Facebook URLs that we're used to now look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/example.profile#!/pages/Another-Page/123456789012345
As far as I can recall, earlier this year it was just a normal URL-fragment-like string (starting with #), without the exclamation mark. But now it's a shebang or hashbang (#!), which I've previously only seen in shell scripts and Perl scripts.
The new Twitter URLs now also feature the #! symbols. A Twitter profile URL, for example, now looks like this:
http://twitter.com/#!/BoltClock
Does #! now play some special role in URLs, like for a certain Ajax framework or something since the new Facebook and Twitter interfaces are now largely Ajaxified?
Would using this in my URLs benefit my Web application in any way?
This technique is now deprecated.
This used to tell Google how to index the page.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
This technique has mostly been supplanted by the ability to use the JavaScript History API that was introduced alongside HTML5. For a URL like www.example.com/ajax.html#!key=value, Google will check the URL www.example.com/ajax.html?_escaped_fragment_=key=value to fetch a non-AJAX version of the contents.
The octothorpe/number-sign/hashmark has a special significance in an URL, it normally identifies the name of a section of a document. The precise term is that the text following the hash is the anchor portion of an URL. If you use Wikipedia, you will see that most pages have a table of contents and you can jump to sections within the document with an anchor, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing identifies the page and Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test is the anchor. The reason that Facebook and other Javascript-driven applications (like my own Wood & Stones) use anchors is that they want to make pages bookmarkable (as suggested by a comment on that answer) or support the back button without reloading the entire page from the server.
In order to support bookmarking and the back button, you need to change the URL. However, if you change the page portion (with something like window.location = 'http://raganwald.com';) to a different URL or without specifying an anchor, the browser will load the entire page from the URL. Try this in Firebug or Safari's Javascript console. Load http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald. Now in the Javascript console, type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald';
You will see the page refresh from the server. Now type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#try_this';
Aha! No page refresh! Type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#and_this';
Still no refresh. Use the back button to see that these URLs are in the browser history. The browser notices that we are on the same page but just changing the anchor, so it doesn't reload. Thanks to this behaviour, we can have a single Javascript application that appears to the browser to be on one 'page' but to have many bookmarkable sections that respect the back button. The application must change the anchor when a user enters different 'states', and likewise if a user uses the back button or a bookmark or a link to load the application with an anchor included, the application must restore the appropriate state.
So there you have it: Anchors provide Javascript programmers with a mechanism for making bookmarkable, indexable, and back-button-friendly applications. This technique has a name: It is a Single Page Interface.
p.s. There is a fourth benefit to this technique: Loading page content through AJAX and then injecting it into the current DOM can be much faster than loading a new page. In addition to the speed increase, further tricks like loading certain portions in the background can be performed under the programmer's control.
p.p.s. Given all of that, the 'bang' or exclamation mark is a further hint to Google's web crawler that the exact same page can be loaded from the server at a slightly different URL. See Ajax Crawling. Another technique is to make each link point to a server-accessible URL and then use unobtrusive Javascript to change it into an SPI with an anchor.
Here's the key link again: The Single Page Interface Manifesto
First of all: I'm the author of the The Single Page Interface Manifesto cited by raganwald
As raganwald has explained very well, the most important aspect of the Single Page Interface (SPI) approach used in FaceBook and Twitter is the use of hash # in URLs
The character ! is added only for Google purposes, this notation is a Google "standard" for crawling web sites intensive on AJAX (in the extreme Single Page Interface web sites). When Google's crawler finds an URL with #! it knows that an alternative conventional URL exists providing the same page "state" but in this case on load time.
In spite of #! combination is very interesting for SEO, is only supported by Google (as far I know), with some JavaScript tricks you can build SPI web sites SEO compatible for any web crawler (Yahoo, Bing...).
The SPI Manifesto and demos do not use Google's format of ! in hashes, this notation could be easily added and SPI crawling could be even easier (UPDATE: now ! notation is used and remains compatible with other search engines).
Take a look to this tutorial, is an example of a simple ItsNat SPI site but you can pick some ideas for other frameworks, this example is SEO compatible for any web crawler.
The hard problem is to generate any (or selected) "AJAX page state" as plain HTML for SEO, in ItsNat is very easy and automatic, the same site is in the same time SPI or page based for SEO (or when JavaScript is disabled for accessibility). With other web frameworks you can ever follow the double site approach, one site is SPI based and another page based for SEO, for instance Twitter uses this "double site" technique.
I would be very careful if you are considering adopting this hashbang convention.
Once you hashbang, you can’t go back. This is probably the stickiest issue. Ben’s post put forward the point that when pushState is more widely adopted then we can leave hashbangs behind and return to traditional URLs. Well, fact is, you can’t. Earlier I stated that URLs are forever, they get indexed and archived and generally kept around. To add to that, cool URLs don’t change. We don’t want to disconnect ourselves from all the valuable links to our content. If you’ve implemented hashbang URLs at any point then want to change them without breaking links the only way you can do it is by running some JavaScript on the root document of your domain. Forever. It’s in no way temporary, you are stuck with it.
You really want to use pushState instead of hashbangs, because making your URLs ugly and possibly broken -- forever -- is a colossal and permanent downside to hashbangs.
To have a good follow-up about all this, Twitter - one of the pioneers of hashbang URL's and single-page-interface - admitted that the hashbang system was slow in the long run and that they have actually started reversing the decision and returning to old-school links.
Article about this is here.
I always assumed the ! just indicated that the hash fragment that followed corresponded to a URL, with ! taking the place of the site root or domain. It could be anything, in theory, but it seems the Google AJAX Crawling API likes it this way.
The hash, of course, just indicates that no real page reload is occurring, so yes, it’s for AJAX purposes. Edit: Raganwald does a lovely job explaining this in more detail.