I have a web site with various graphs embedded in it that are generated externally. Occasionally those graphs will fail to generate and I would like to catch that when it happens. These graphs are embedded in multiple pages and I would rather not check each page manually. Is there any kind of tool or perhaps a browser addon that could periodically take screenshots of different URLs and email them in a single email? It would be sufficient to have scaled-down screenshots of full pages emailed maybe once a day to me, allowing me to take a quick glance and see that all the graphs are there and look okay.
I'm a big fan of automation. Rather than have emails generated that you then have to look at, take a look at 'replacing custom missing images in jquery'. This will run a piece of Javascript for each image that fails. Extending that to make a request to a URL that you control, which may also include the broken URL (or just the filename that is broken) would not be too hard. That URL would then generate an email, and store the broken URL so that it doesn't send 5000 emails if there's a flurry of hits to your page.
Another idea building on the above is to effectively change the external 404 from the source site to a local one (eg /backend/missing-images/) - the full-path need not exist - you are just generating a local 404 record in your apache logs. Logwatch will send a list of 404 pages from the apache log to you daily (or more often, if you want) by email.
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I am considering making a very simple form for clients to use in a sort of web browser kiosk fashion, where they submit some of their information through the computer in the lobby at their option instead of writing something out by hand. This would be used if they come in person rather than calling or going to the web site first. I already have a form on our site for clients to use from their home computers so this would be very similar but tailored for and only used for the in-person clients.
Since the form will sort of just loop back to itself (not really "back" but just have a link to go back to a fresh form) for a fresh form after every client, how can I ensure that one can't hit back a few times to see the previous client's info? It's not really sensitive data, I just would like to provide that bit of privacy. Of course clients using our web site and the form there from their own computer are responsible for their own privacy.
Apart from having customer service walk to the computer and close and reopen the browser, or using AJAX, what should I do?
The other topics I've read related to this all have someone basically saying "you're not supposed to do that, you bad person". This seems like a valid reason to me. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Disable autocomplete by adding autocomplete="off" to the input tags or form tag.
I have a niche website that needs to allow users to post events and other things to the website. Wordpress works perfectly for this option (as well as other needs). The problem is, there is also a weekly newsletter (published as a PDF file) that gets sent to a large opt-in email list. Is there any way to configure Wordpress (via plugin or hack) to send the CONTENTS of the post to the admin in a csv or rtf file of some sort? The posts themselves will have several custom fields. Most of the stuff I churn up when I search for "post to email" for Wordpress is the other way around, for people wanting to send an email and have that post to their site, which is not what I want to do. I suppose other ideas of getting around my problem are open to consideration too. Thanks!!
One way I am thinking you could accomplish this but haven't tested it. You could make a php script to parse the rss feed and email that contents. Depending on whether how many posts get done in a week, you could either create a function for it to fire after the post is posted; or have a cron job on it and send it once a week before the newsletter is to be sent. Sorry I'm not in front of my machine that has WP installed to test it out.
While I haven't actually used it, an email analytics web app called Litmus claims to be able to track:
How long someone takes to read an email.
Whether it is forwarded.
Whether it is deleted.
Whether it is printed.
What email client was used to read it.
I'm curious about where it gets this information from. Most email clients i've seen don't even load external images without explicitly loading them, let alone javascript.
Even if a lot just support images, that wouldn't give away items 1-3.
Here's my best guess. As this link rockinthesixstring posted says, it relies on images but not javascript.
How long someone takes to read an email.
Place several images in the email that take a while to load, if the email is read for a long time, more are loaded.
Whether it is forwarded.
Is the image loaded from more than one IP/user agent?
Whether it is deleted.
The screenshots show this combined with glanced.
Whether it is printed.
Add a background image bug to a print stylesheet.
What email client was used to read it.
Check the user agent.
Any email analytics application I've seen use an image tracker. Basically if you attach a code generated 1x1 px image somewhere in the email, then during the loading of that image on the server side, you capture all of the ServerVariables
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms524602%28VS.90%29.aspx
EDIT:
I just read some of the information on the Litmus website an it looks as though it confirms what I wrote above regarding image tracking
So, 'Litmus', a web app for testing emails and webpages across browsers and email clients, has a proprietary method that they claim is able to track not just opens, clicks, browsers, etc (standard with an embedded image and pass-through link tracking.)
What's unique is they claim that they are able to track what actions the end user took, how long the end user read it for, and if they deleted or forwarded the email. They claim they do this without JavaScript, and purely using embedded images. They claim that the method works across most major email clients.
What could they be doing to track this? Obviously, if they're doing it with third party applications that they don't control, whatever they are doing should be replicable.
I'm thinking that they realized that when an email client forwards or deletes an email, it 'opens' the email in a different way then normal, creating a unique user string on the server log of some kind? I'm grasping at strings, though.
http://litmusapp.com/email-analytics
Details here http://litmusapp.com/help/analytics/how-it-works
EDIT: It also looks like they track Prints. Maybe they do this by tracking calls to the 'print' css?
It's all done with good ol' image bugs. Breaking down how they find out...
Which client was used: Check the user-agent
Whether an email was forwarded: Done by attaching image bugs to divs that are loaded only when the message is forwarded.
Whether an email was printed: bug attached to print stylesheet
How long it takes to read an email: A connection that's kept open, as pointed out by Forrest (this is also how Facebook tracks(ed?) whether or not you are online on chat).
Whether an email was deleted: Check If a message was read for a short period of time or not opened. In fact, they group "glanced" and "deleted" together.
Of course none of this will work if email clients disable images in emails.
EDIT: Here's another question on this:
The OP actually has their tracking code, and this answer here explains how it works.
One way I can think of doing that is having an embedded image that loads from a script on a server. The script would not return anything or maybe send data really slowly to keep the connection open. Once the email is deleted the connection would be closed. This way they could know how long the email was open. Maybe they just assume if it's open for less than 10 seconds it was deleted?
Another way is tracking the referrer - this would give a lot of data on what a webmail client is doing, but I doubt it would be useful with a desktop client.
They know when the email is opened (it's when the image is called from their http server).
They also know what the user do and when since they can easily replace all links with their own tracking URLs redirecting to the original link.
There is nothing exceptional here. They are just a bit more advanced than their compatitors. There is no magic.
I have only one doubt: how they track delete. Technically, there is no way to know what happened to the message after it was read.
I suspect that a "deleted" mail is a mail that is never opened.
For example,
if user goes to google -> example.com -> newwebsite.com
If he goes back to example.com, the http-referrer page will still be google.com
How can I detect that he went to newwebsite.com
I believe that the back button will send the HTTP headers that were sent to the site the first time around, since it's not really a new visit.
Say you displayed an error page if the user's http-referrer was newwebsite.com. The first time they visited, they would get your site. If they went to newwebsite.com, and then hit back (meaning they wanted to go back in time, through their browser history, not load the page again with new headers), then they would get an error page, and the nature of the back button would be defeated. I don't know if this inspires that behavior or not, it just makes sense to me that way.
Maybe it's possible, but it would be entirely browser-dependent. Why do you need this functionality, anyway? Newwebsite isn't referring the user to your website at all, there's no connection between the two at all--it just happens to be the last page that the user visited.
If a visitor uses the back button, the page might be loaded from browser cache. In that case, no referrer is sent.
Using google analytics, you can see how many visitors came from a given web site. This might give you some information.
I don't believe that this is generally possible. You could pull tricks with javascript on your site so that all the links navigated from there could be detected and recorded, but once the users off your site you've got no control.
If you provided the browser, ie. developed your one yourself, then you could choose to expose the browser history via an api.
http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-youve-been.html
Describes a technique for exploiting the browsers agreement to modify links to indicate that they have been traversed (eg. changing the colour of the link) so that visited sites can be detected, however this only works for a pre-declared set of links, it's not a generally applicable approach.
My feeling is that attempts to hide the nature of browsers - users can hop around all over the place - tend to lead to unsatisfactory 79% solutions that mystify users.
What problem are you actually trying to solve?
You can use sessions inorder to track the path of pages.it really works wwell.try it.