I'm trying to create a vCard containing the text below:
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
PHOTO;VALUE=uri:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Intel_logo_%282006-2020%29.jpg
N:Raven;Test;;;
END:VCARD
according to this documentation (
screenshot of the part I'm talking about ) I tried base64 and it's working fine ( Contact app loads the image ) but in the URI situation it's not working ( Contact app does not load the image ),
To avoid making a large file, my goal is to have a url in my vCard.vcf file not a base64, I'm stuck understanding what's wrong with my vCard.
basically what I'm trying to make is a vCard containing a photo that gets fetched by the url given and shows the photo in contact app of whatever OS the user will open it on (Windows/Android/IOS/macOS).
I'm not using base64 because it makes my vCard file so big.
External urls are probably blocked by most programs, same as loading external images are blocked. It's a massive privacy concern.
Maybe hosting it on a service like Google Cloud would help, in that you can edit the CONTENT-TYPE and CACHE meta data attributes? It’s my novice understanding that smartphone OS is particularly wary of “unknown” file properties - probably for good reason.
Related
I want the user to upload his picture when he registers his information.
The thing is when the user uploads his image.. should automatically create a folder with his ID to be like this wwwroot/images/UserID/fadi.jpg
Basically: you really shouldn't. The wwwroot is for static assets used by the application. You're using server-side, so in theory it might be possible but that's not what the folder is meant for. An alternative method like AWS would be preferred, but if you can't do that (either because of payment requirements or other complications) I would suggest saving the image to your database. One way to do this would be to base64 encode the image and save it that way. I'm not going to give an example of that here, there are plenty available elsewhere. One such example is this.
Why I can't update image this way?
Bigcommerce::createProductImage($product_id, array('image_file'=>'/home/user/bigcommerce/api/picture.jpg'));
The follow code works:
Bigcommerce::createProductImage($product_id, array('image_file'=>'https://cdn6.bigcommerce.com/s-0cvdh/products/32/images/299/apitec71q__46081.1484240387.1280.1280__30161.1484331218.1280.1280.jpg'));
According to the documentation, it is not possible to upload an image locally. The docs say:
When specifying a product image, the image_file should be specified as either:
a path to an image already uploaded via FTP to the import directory (with the path
relative to the import directory); or a URL to an image accessible on the internet.
It doesn't work because the BigCommerce servers have no idea where "/home/user/bigcommerce/api/picture.jpg" lives. That's a file that exists on your local machine, and you're passing a string to BigCommerce telling it where to get the file. It works in the second case because BigCommerce can access that URI.
In more general terms, you need to upload the image to a location that BigCommerce can access it, and then pass a URI that BigCommerce can use to retrieve the image. It may seem a little cumbersome, but it relieves BigCommerce from having to stream large amounts of data through their API.
On my photography website, I am storing photos on Amazon S3. To actually display them on the website, I am using signed URLs. This means that image URLs expire. Only the web application itself is able to generate valid image file URLs.
An example URL would look like this:
http://media.jungledragon.com/images/1849/21346_small.JPG?AWSAccessKeyId=05GMT0V3GWVNE7GGM1R2&Expires=1411603210&Signature=9MMO3zEXECtvB0w%2FuMEN8obt1ow%3D
Note that by the time you read this, that URL may have already expired. That's ok, the question is about the format.
Whilst the above URL format works fine on the website, it breaks XML files. The reason for this is the & character, which should be escaped.
For example, I'm trying to implement Windows 8.1 live tiles for the website, which you can link to an RSS feed. My RSS feed is here:
http://www.jungledragon.com/all/rss/promoted
That feed will work in most RSS readers, however, the Windows 8 tile builder (http://www.buildmypinnedsite.com/en) is particularly strict about the XML being valid. Here you can see the error it throws on said feed:
http://notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com/?feed=http://www.jungledragon.com/all/rss/promoted&id=1
Now, my simple thinking was to encode the & that are part of the signed URLs, by & or &. Whilst that may make the XML valid, unfortunately S3 does not accept & to be encoded. When used like that, the image will no longer load.
I'm wondering whether I am in a circular problem that cannot be solved?
I have had many similar problems with RSS feeds. XML documents should always use & (or an equivalent like & or &). If a reader is not capable of extracting the URL properly, then the reader is the culprit, not you. But I can tell you that reader programmers will disagree with you.
If you are a programmer, you could fix the problem by having a redirect, but that's a bit of work. So you'd retrieve the URL from S3, save that in your database and create a URL on your website such as http://www.jungledragon.com/images/123 and link the S3 URL with your images/123 page. Now when someone goes to page images/123, you retrieve the URL you saved from your S3 server.
Actually, if the URL http://www.jungledragon.com/images/123 is a reference to your image, you can get the S3 URL at that time and do the redirect on the fly!
I'm writing an obj-c app and would like to upload a binary file a few megs in size to my appengine server (python). I'm guessing I need to use the blob entity for this, but am unsure how to go about doing this. I've been using http requests and responses to send and receive data up to now, but they've been encoded in strings. Can someone advise how I'd go about doing the same with blobs from an obj-c app? I see some examples that involve http requests but they seem geared toward web page and I'm not terribly familiar with it. Are there any decent tutorials or walkthroughs perhaps?
I'm basically not completely sure, if I'm supposed to encode it into the http request and send it back through the response, how to get the binary data into the http string from the client and how to send it back properly from the server when downloading my binary data. I'm thinking perhaps the approach has to be totally different from what I'm used to with encoding values into my request in the param1=val¶m2=val2 style format but uncertain.
Should I be using the blobstore service for this? One important note is that I've heard there is a 1 meg limit on blobs, but I have audio files 2-3 megs in size that I need to store (at the very least 1.8 megs).
I recently had to do something similar, though it was binary data over a socket connection. To the client using XML, to the server as a data stream. I ended up base64 encoding the binary data when sending it back and forth. It's a bit wordy but especially on the client side it made things easier to deal with, no special characters to worry about in my XML. I then translated it with NSData into a real binary format. I used this code to do the encoding and decoding, search for "cyrus" to find the snippet I used, there are a few that would work here.
In your case I would change your http request to a post data call rather than putting it all in the URL. If you're not sure what the difference is, have a look here.
I'm not as familiar with python, but you could try here for help on that end.
Hope that helps.
Edit - it looks like blobs are the way to go. Have a look at this link for the string/blob type as well as this link for more info on working with the blob.
There are three questions in one here:
Should you use a BLOB for binary data?
How do you post binary data, and use it from app engine
How do you retrieve binary data from app engine
I can't answer if you "should" use blobs, only you would know the answer to that, and it greatly depends upon the type of data you are trying to store, and how it will be used. Let's take an image for example (which is probably the most popular use case for this). You want users to take a photo with their phone, upload it, and then share it with other users. That's a good use of blobs, but as #slycrel suggests you'll run into limitations on record size. This can be workable, for example you could use the python image library (pil) to downsize the image.
To post binary data, see this question. It would be best to cache 2 copies, a thumbnail and a full size. This way the resizing only has to happen once, on upload. If you want to go one better, you can use the new background jobs feature of app engine to queue up the image processing for later. Either way, you'll want to return the ID of the newly created blob so you can reference it from the device without an additional http request.
To retrieve data, I think the best approach would be to treat the BLOB as it's own resource. Adjust your routes such that any given blob has a unique URL:
http://myweb/images/(thumbnail|fullsize)/<blobid>.(jpg|png|gif)
Where BLOBID is dynamic, and JPG, PNG or GIF could be used to get the particular type of image. Thumbnail or fullsize could be used to retrieve the smaller or larger version you saved when they posted it.
I have recently placed an ad in a weekly publication that sends out a PDF file. My ad is directly linked so that the reader can click on it and go to my website. The PDF file is hosted on a different server, but is, in fact, a PDF file that has to be downloaded and viewed on that site, not emailed or shared that way. I have Google Analytics and a couple other stats tracking programs installed and I can't see the referring URL from this other site at all, in anything. Is there something I can ask the designer of the PDF file to include in her links to make them trackable? Or is this simply not possible?
Use Google Analytics Campaign Tagging.
This tool will help set it up. You'll want to classify the variables such that the source and the medium are set, at minimum.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
So, for example, if your URL is http://example.com, you could set the parameters as such:
utm_source: BlahNews
utm_medium: newsletter
utm_campaign: july10issue
Your resulting URL would be http://example.com/?utm_source=BlahNews&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=july10issue
Google Analytics would track these hits under that Campaign, Source and medium.
If the URL is displayed raw, and want to avoid 'displaying' an ugly URL, you could setup an internal redirect to that URL, and it looks like you're using WordPress, there are a few free plugins that manage redirects like this (I happen to like 'Redirection')
So, you could tell the plugin to redirect
http://example.com/blahnews TO http://example.com/?utm_source=BlahNews&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=july10issue
Can you ask them to put some token in the query string of the URL to the site?