What is Google Analytics' __utm.gif used for (You know that 1px × 1px gif image that loads on every page with Google Analytics)?
I see my screen resolution and other stuff in the URL. Is that how they send all the site's data back to their servers? With a get request on an image? Cause that's kinda uber clever!
it is a web beacon. Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon
The image is dynamically generated and the URL is linked to your account.
When you request the image, Google knows your IP address and some other basic info and can deduce your location, the time of the request, your browser, etc.
The main reason, though, is cross-site-scripting. Requesting an image is easier and completely cross-browser, as you'd have to use JSON to send a request with that information back to Google.
Is that how they send all the site's data back to their servers?
Yes.
Yes, you are correct. This request is used to send Google details about a particular page request, namely:
URL pageview information
Campaign information
Ecommerce data
Browser properties
Visitor IDs
Related
I'm building a website for a client (real estate), and on the website are links to a different website (adverts for properties). My client routinely activates and deactivates these adverts when he rents out a certain property.
The hrefs on my links look something like this:
<a href="https://domain.xx/estate/idxx/des-crip-tion-xx-xx-x-xx/">. If the advert is indeed active, it just takes them to the advert. If it is not active, however, the website in question redirects the user to https://domain.xx/estate-for-rent/city/, effectively sending the users to my client's competition.
I wish to implement some logic where, before handing the users over to the other website, the server checks to see if it is redirected to https://domain.xx/estate-for-rent/city/, or some similar logic, and if so, uses preventDefault, or something, and notifies the user that the advert is not available instead of sending them to the other website.
I wonder if I can use the fact that only if the advert is active does the resulting url in the users browser window (after they've been directed to the other website) match the url in my href. Can i somehow get the server to try to access the url in my href, and have it see where it gets redirected, and then do something based on that? On the back-end, I'm running NodeJS with Express by the way, and if it matters, I'm relying heavily on EJS for templating. Thanks in advance for any help!
This sounds more like a problem you could solve on the client as opposed to the server. For example, at a high level here's how I would do it:
Handle the click event for each link (really simple to do a catch-all with jQuery)
Fire off a HEAD request via AJAX to the destination URL (this would be much more efficient than a GET but depends on the external service supporting this verb)
Use the status code to determine what to do next (e.g. 2xx allow redirect, 3xx pop a message and block)
This has been driving me nuts all day:
I have an iOS app with a custom URL scheme defined, and am trying to share a link on FB which points to a page that has this scheme in its applink meta tags, so that tapping it should fire up my app.
Every little piece of it is working just fine. I can enter my URL scheme in safari on the phone and the browser launches my app. I have tested my webpage with the FB debug tool and there are no errors or warnings - it correctly identifies all the meta tags.
If I share the link using FB on the phone or on my laptop, all works fine.
HOWEVER, if I share the exact same link using FBSDKShareDialog, it does not work. It just opens the web page with the meta tags as if it was any regular web page.
Anyone has any idea why these two ways of sharing would be different? They look exactly the same otherwise.
If anyone else runs into this problem, here's the reply from FB:
When you share with mode automatic, the app does a fast app switch over to the FB app to show the native share dialog
The post is cached locally on the device, and it does not know about app links (since only Facebook server side knows about it)
When the user opens the FB, the user sees their cached story (with no app links behavior),
This doesn't manifest with the Web mode since the Facebook app needs
to pull from the server to get the post, in which case it has all the
app links info.
This is unlikely something that we'll fix. However, after a while, the
cache will expire, and Facebook app will re-pull the posts from the
servers, in which case the app link data will be available.
In order to test this, you can share the post on one device, and then
try clicking on the post from another device. The app links should
work at that point.
Which is kind of a lame response IMO - they parse the target page to build the preview, how hard would it be to remember the applink and use it?
There could be two possible issues:
Either the one told by #NJ, i.e. you are just trying to open the link in Facebook app, using the same device from which you posted the link.'
Solution - either open link in other device or cose and re-open your facebook app and do multiple refresh
Or You have some error in your meta tags. There is one important thing though, that Facebook never mentions, i.e. they cache the URL you provide.
So any one used the web link with meta tags the first time in Facebook, Whole meta tags will be cached, and you updated meta tags won't be parsed by facebook.
Solution
To get over with the issue, use below link
Facebook debug tool
Input your meta data included web page URL and
-click on show existing scrape information to find any error
Click on Fetch new scrape information for refreshing your URL on facebook. it will clear the cache for that URL in facebook server.
I have a link on my page that redirects to another page but the request is sent through POST method. Now when the user refreshes the new page the request is sent through GET method. The URL is just used to display a page. My question is, is it advisable to use both POST and GET for the same URL call or will it cause problems related to security or any other? If so please do explain how.
No. Use POST if the link is executing an unsafe action (e.g. logout, change password) or it is sending sensitive data you do not want displayed in the URL (URLs are logged by default in the browser history and by many appliances, proxies and web servers). POST can also be used when a large amount of information is to be sent.
Otherwise use GET.
Can Chromecast be used to display a web site or web app? All the sample sender/receivers I've seen so far show how to play videos. The docs posted so far are minimal as best, just an API reference with little explanation what any of it does. I just want to send a URL of my choosing and have that page displayed on the TV. There's no user interaction required past that point. Assuming that's possible, does anyone have sample Chrome sender and receiver code for that?
I was able to modify the Github sample Project > googlecast/CastHelloText-chrome
to show a web page.
In the receiver.html file, I replaced the DIV with an IFRAME and styled it for 100% width and height.
Then in the displayText() function I changed innerHTML to src.
The only modification made to the sender chromehellotext.html was to replace YOUR_APPLICATION_ID with the app id created by registering the receiver.
Note that some sites like Google and Yahoo will not display inside an iframe. If you really needed to do that you could skip the iframe and just set window.location.href to the URL. That, of course, will overwrite your receiver code so the only way to change URLs would be to manually disconnect first and reload. I tried using window.open instead but that did not work.
One could imagine writing a Custom Receiver that has an iframe that wraps any website. Your sender would could then send webpages to your receiver, and the onLoad would set the the URL of the iframe. Don't have any code, but it's fairly simple to write.
There is a simple way to do that with the hellotext sample. You can send the html by typing that into the text field.
<iframe src="http://mywebpage.com" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></iframe>
To provide extra info from the current answer, as this post comes up near top on most searches.
Thing to search for is Digital Signage, this is the sort of industry word.
following GreenScreen Chromecast works okay. Greenscreen
host solution is Sign Simple - which looks to be same approach as Greenscreen without you needing to host the receiver web page.
Similar hosted solutions using Raspberry Pi can be found.
Of note: with GreenScreen and the CastHelloText, I could not get 1080p only 720p, some comments mention Video only in 1080p, but Images in 720p, which I take to mean html pages aswell.
Chromecast can indeed be used to display an arbitrary URL.
This can be done from plain old Chrome, using 'url-cast-receiver'. (Usable 'demo' page, GitHub project page.)
The tool I'm building needs pull data from IBM Connections Ideation Blogs. I therefore use the Connections API with basic authentication to read Blog Entries. This goes well until the description contains images. When I ask the API to provide media resources for the blog, it does not show any entries of the /BLOGS_UPLOADED_IMAGES location - the one containing images uploaded through the blog's richtext editor. The user I use in my API call is the same user who created blog entries and uploaded pictures.
However the API call DOES contain images I publish using the API and a POST request to the blog's media entry collection. This is where the next problem appears. Those Atom entries for images contain various links, one of them with a ref="enclosure", of which the API documentation (link) tells me to "Use the web address in the href attribute to obtain the binary content of the file". However, my calls to this adress are always answered with 404 response code.
Another url in the Atom entry (this time of the element) is described by the same documentation (see link above) as: "Provides access the document's media. The following operation is supported: GET: Use the web address to obtain the media." When I make a call to this url, as always with basic authentication credentials attached, the response contains the html of the login form of Connections, so API authentication does not seem to be supported on this url. This is only the case for non-public communities, which require authentication, of course, if the picture is publicly availabe all works just fine.
Am I missing something out? Is there another way to retrieve the actual image from a blog's media entry through the API? Are manually uploaded pictures never contained in the media entries result or is this a bug?
It now magically works using the link with ref="enclosure" from the atom entry. I might have gotten something wrong with authentication I guess (although I'm not actually realizing what I'm doing different now than I did before).
Problem remaining: Pictures uploaded through the rich-text editor in the folder /BLOGS_UPLOADED_IMAGES do not appear in the media feed of the blog.