I have a small chrome extension that helps users to quickly search for Pokémon Content and I'd like to know if there is a way to pass a message from my users to me...
I'd like to do this to get data from my users, data like what is being searched most, the most used options, things like this for curiosity...
Is there any way to do something like this?
I thought about creating another extension to pass message, but as far as I know, Chrome Extensions can only pass messages to another extension the user has...
So, is there any way to do something like this?
You could send the information to a server and store it in a database, or a log file of some kind. I know I've used multiple chrome extensions of some kind in the past that use a connection to a server hosted by the company/developer that created the plugin.
Related
Bots are amazing, unless you're Google Analytics
After many months of learning to host my own Discord bot, I finally figured it out! I now have a node server running on my localhost that sends and receives data from my Discord server; it works great. I can do all kinds of the things I want to with my Discord bot.
Given that I work with analytics everyday, one project I want to figure out is how to send data to Google Analytics (specifically GA4) from this node server.
NOTE: I have had success in sending data to my Universal Analytics property. However, as awesome as that was to finally see pageviews coming into, it was equally heartbreaking to recall that Google will be getting rid of Universal Analytics in July of this year.
I have tried the following options:
GET/POST requests to the collect endpoint
This option presented itself as impossible from the get-go. In order to send a request to the collection endpoint, a client_id must be sent along with the request itself. And this client_id is something that must be generated using Google's client id algorithm. So, I can't just make one up.
If you consider this option possible, please let me know why.
Install googleapis npm package
At first, I thought I could just install the googleapis package and be ready to go, but that idea fell on its face immediately too. With this package, I can't send data to GA, I can only read with it.
Find and install a GTM npm package
There are GTM npm packages out there, but I quickly found out that they all require there to be a window object, which is something my node server would not have because it isn't a browser.
How I did this for Universal Analytics
My biggest goal is to do this without using Python, Java, C++ or any other low level languages. Because, that route would require me to learn new languages. Surely it's possible with NodeJS alone... no?
I eventually stumbled upon the idea of actually hosting a webpage as some sort of pseudo-proxy that would send data from the page to GA when accessed by something like a page scraper. It was simple. I created an HTML file that has Google Tag Manager installed on it, and all I had to do was use the puppeteer npm package.
It isn't perfect, but it works and I can use Google Tag Manager to handle and manipulate input, which is wonderful.
Unfortunately, this same method will not work for GA4 because GA4 automatically excludes all identified bot traffic automatically, and there is no way to turn that setting off. It is a very useful feature for GA4, giving it quite a bit more integrity than UA, and I'm not trying to get around that fact, but it is now the Bane of my entire goal.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9888366?hl=en
Where to go from here?
I'm nearly at the end of my wits on figuring this one out. So, either an npm package exists out there that I haven't found yet, or this is a futile project.
Does anyone have any experience in sending data from NodeJS to GA4? (or even GTM?) How did you do it?
...and this client_id is something that must be generated using Google's client id algorithm. So, I can't just make one up...
Why, of course you can. GA4 generates it pretty much the same as UA does. You don't need anything from google to do it.
Besides, instead of mimicking just requests to the collect endpoint, you may just wanna go the MP route right away: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4 The links #dockeryZ gave, work perfectly fine. Maybe try opening them in incognito, or in a different browser? Maybe you have a plugin blocking analytics urls.
Moreover, you don't really need to reinvent the bicycle. Node already has a few packages to send events to GA4, here's one looking good: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ga4-mp?activeTab=readme
Or you can just use gtag directly to send events. I see a lot of people doing it even on the front-end: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ga-gtag Gtag has a whole api not described in there. Here's more on gtag: https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/gtagjs/reference Note how the library allows you to set the client id there.
The only caveat there is that you'll have to track client ids and session ids manually. Shouldn't be too bad though. Oh, and you will have to redefine the concept of a pageview, I guess. Well, the obvious one is whenever people post in the chan that is different from the previous post in a session. Still, this will have to be defined in the code.
Don't worry about google's bot traffic detection. It's really primitive. Just make sure your useragent doesn't scream "bot" in it. Make something better up.
I'm writing and E2E test for an application written in Electron. I need to test a button which calls in effect shell.openExternal('link') where link is an external website. I've been looking in the webdriver docs for something which allows the test intercept this call, but it doesn't look like anything like that exists in the API at all.
1) if something like this does exist an I missed it in the docs, please enlighten me in ways of the light side of the force,
2) if not, then does anyone out there in stackoverflow land have a fancy work-around?
Thanks so much!
I came up with an answer. Instead of trying to intercept the click, I added an env var in the main app such that when set, the click will put an entry into the log instead of actually opening the external link in a browser. Then I use the API in spectron to slurp up the render process logs: https://github.com/electron-userland/spectron#clientgetrenderprocesslogs
Then I can just look for a custom string in the logs and I can judge the proper text is present.
In my content script, I want to monitor which file a is getting uploaded to a web application.
I monitor "change" event for any "input:file" element. It works on any site (such as Gmail) that uses "input:file".
However sites like imgur, use SWFUpload mechanism. I tried to capture "fileQueued" event on element that I suspected to be swfupload. But that did not work.
How can I capture file upload event for sites that use swfupload?
Are there any other plugins that manage file uploading that I would need to take care in my content script?
Is there any generic mechanism to tackle this problem?
(I am aware of drag-n-drop mechanism, but I have not handled that case so far.
I have also read following relevant question on SO:
Grab file with chrome extension before upload)
It's probably worth your time to experiment with the chrome.webRequest API; it appears that the onBeforeRequest event contains info about file uploads. It's a complex API with extra parameters to addListener; read the docs thoroughly.
I have this Web Developer app that sends list data to another set of .aspx/aspx.cs files like this:
Session.Add("Selected-List-Details", Selected-List-Details);
Server.Transfer("new-file-name.aspx");
The problem, however, is if more than one user tries to do something at the same time, data is getting cross-contaminated between the 2 sessions.
Is there a better way to do this? Is there a simple workaround? Am I overlooking a useful session function?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms525800(v=vs.90).aspx. seems to show how to send the session id with your server.transfer
I know there's a way for extensions and pages to communicate locally, but I need to send a message from an outside URL, have my Chrome Extension listen for it.
I have tried easyXDM in the background page, but it seems to stop listening after awhile, as if Google "turns off" the Javascript in the background page after awhile.
I think you may try some walk around and build a site with some specific data structure, and then implement a content script which will look for this specific that specific data structure, and when i finds one it can fetch the data you want to be passed to your extension.
Yes, you need a content script that communicates with the page using DOM Events.. Instructions on how to do that are here:
http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/content_scripts.html#host-page-communication