Many sites have this implemented, I don't know how exactly it is called so its hard for me to search for it
you can see links in websites such as facebook,twitter that have urls similar to
www.website.com/some-article?ref=home
so in this case, the back-end will take note that the link was clicked from the home page and keep track of this
my question is - is there a known practice / knowledge on how this needs to be done or do I just need to insert my own ref parameters and keep track of this manually?
is there a gem / library that assists in doing this?
You can do this manually. It's very easy to implement. Most website like facebook and twitter use this to track what their users generally do. This is kind of silent survey that is used to provide better user experience.
It is also used in search engines such as Google to track where the traffic for particular hit comes from. You will know this better if you have a Google blogspot blog.
But, there is no limit to innovation. You can use it in whichever way you want.
In PHP, you can use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER"]
session_start();
if ( !isset( $_SESSION["origURL"] ) )
$_SESSION["origURL"] = $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"];
Sorry, I don't know ruby. There should be pre-written libraries to help you in this, but I don't know about any. You can create your own library for this. It will provide better control.
Related
I am new to this site and coding. I have self taught myself html and I understand css. I have been putting together a site of mine using my basic knowledge. I have no college experience but this is MY DREAM to put this site together so I have done a lot of research and read books to get started but I have hit a roadblock now. Here is what I have done:
-I have put together all of the front end pages and design using html/css. So, I have all of the pages that would be involved with the site, ready to go. All designed and have the layout how I wish it to be.
I guess I would call it the "skeleton" of the site. Any page that a user would be directed to, I have in a folder.
I have put together a little "demo" for myself to mimic a user experience. For example, I created a login page that "looks" how i want it to be but it doesnt actually store or save any logins.
This is my first question:
What is my next step? I admit it sounds stupd but I am self taught and I really have the ambition to acheive this I just can not figure out where to go from here in order to actually make a functioning site. All I have right now is my html "demo" where basically I have to follow a certain path down my site that mimics what a user would do on the site. I have it now where I click on the "sign up" button on my html form and it basically just redirects to my "new user" page. Then it is the same formula throughout the rest of my demo. I just put my other html pages I have designed into the html to sort of give a "user experience" to the demo. But I REALLY want to be able to have working accounts and saved data.
How do I create/save a user login to my site? DO i need to get a sql database? Is there a free one to use while i build the site? Honestly i really need someone who is willing to help me out with the steps in this journey without me sharing my entire site (i wish to keep it to my self) but.. i understand this is basic web stuff i just am genuinely lost as how to take it to the next level. I have all of the html done and now i need a way to actually make it work. I wish to conversate with someone please about this kink in the chain i am seeming to find myself in please. Thank you so much and I would be grateful. :)
----basically what programming languages do i need to learn, or when looking for someone to hire, what should they be skilled in? any software or sites or databases that i need? please help!!!
HTML and CSS are the languages that make up the front end of a website, like you said. In order for your website to have dynamic content (content specific to a user) and the ability to actually process logins, etc., there needs to be a server involved. A webpage is a text document that is interpreted by a browser. HTML makes up the content and CSS tells the browser how you want it to look. What you are missing, primarily, is server scripts, most commonly, in my experience, PHP. You can also include JavaScript for client-side effects.
Specific to your question about a user login, yes, you will need a database. The process should look something like this.
User visits login page
User enters information into an HTML form
User clicks submit
Form is submitted to a server URL using the 'POST' method
Server validates the form content
Server checks database for username or email (whichever you are using)
If the username/email exists, it compares the passwords
Server sends a response back to the client, either good or bad
Once the user is validated, you can redirect the user to the dashboard or user section.
Please keep in mind this is a very simplistic version of events. There are more in depth steps that need to be taken, for example, your passwords should never be stored in a database as plain text, you should use a one-way encryption (hashing) algorithm to make them unreadable. Then when a password is given to the server it should be hashed and you should compare the hashes. You can also use salts when hashing for more security. The form should use SSL to prevent man in the middle attacks, etc.
Sounds like you are off to a good start, but in order to make it work you have to add the server logic. Self-teaching will get you as far as you are willing to let it. I taught myself how to do web programming, and now I do it as a business. The Internet is a great resource. There are a ton of great tutorials online that will show you how to do everything I just laid out.
I am making a social network application where user will come and share the posts like facebook. But now I have some doubts like lets say a user is just shared a content by coping it from another site and same with the case of images. So does google crawler consider it as a duplicate content or not?
If yes then how I can tell to the google crawler that "don't consider it as a spam, its a social networking site and the content is shared by the user not by the me". Is there any way or any kind of technique that help me.
Google might consider it to be duplicate content, in which case the search algorithm will choose 1 version, which it believes to be the original or more important one and drop the other.
This isn't a bad thing per se - unless you see that most of your site's content is becoming duplicated.
You can use canonical URL declarations to do what you are saying, but i wouldn't advise it.
If your website belongs to one of these types - forum or e-commerce, it will not be punished for duplicate content issue. I think "social platform" is one type of forum.
If your pages are too similar, the result is that the two or more similar pages will scatter the click rate, flow etc, so the rank in SERPs may not look well.
I suggest do not use "canonical" because this instruction tell the crawlers do not crawl/count this page. If you use it, in the webmaster tool, you will see the indexed pages decrease a lot.
Do not too worry about the duplicate content issue. You can see this article: Google’s Matt Cutts: Duplicate Content Won’t Hurt You, Unless It Is Spammy
If you use the standard handlesbar.js implementation, does Google view the content within the custom script tags as content, script or unknown content?
If you're in doubt, do in pure HTML. Unfortunately, Google should ignore this. I looked about, and all I heard is that this application was not made to be searchfriendly.
In fact, Google undestand and even follow links created via Javascript, but handlebarsjs is very more complex.
Possible solution
A strong suggestion that I make to you is load a simplified version with some content in plain simplified and after use handlebarsjs, so at then at least do not let google completely blind. But thsi version should be used also to end user, because google Will know if you show a diferent content just for Googlebot.
Possible solution 2
Exist a way to make websites that rely heavily on AJAX still work in Making AJAX Applications Crawlable
So, we're trying to up our application in the rankings in the search engines, and one way our SEO guy told us to do that was to register similar domains...for example we have something like
http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html
so..we acquired the domain parks.com (again just an example).
Now when people go to http://www.parks.com ...we want it to display the content of http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html.
I could just put a forwarding page there, but from what i've been told that makes us look bad because it's technically a permanent redirect..and we're trying to get higher in the search engine rankings, not lower.
Is this a situation where we would use the Server.Transfer method of ASP.net?
How are situations like this handled, because I've defiantly seen this done by many websites.
We also don't want to cheat the system, we are showing relevant content and not spam or tricking customers in anyway, so the proper way to do achieve what i'm looking for would be great.
Thanks
Use your "similar" domain names to host individual and targetted landing pages that will point to your master content.
It's easier to manage and you will get a higher conversion rate.
Having to create individual page will force you to write relevent content and will increase the popularity of the page.
I also suggest you to not only build landing pages, but mini sites (of few pages).
SEO is sa very high demanding task.
Regarding technical aspects: Server.Transfer is what you should use. Never use Response.Redirect, Google and other search engines will drop your ranking.
I used permanent URL rewrite in the past. I changed my website and since lots of traffic was coming from others website linking mine, I wanted to have a permanent solution.
Read more about URL rewriting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
I would like to be able to generate custom bit.lys (http://bit.ly/thecakeisalie type things) through their API. This does not appear to be possible, but I thought I'd check; does anyone happen to know otherwise?
This unfortunately had to be removed for our free users due to on-going abuse. All of the custom bitlinks on bit.ly are created in the same key space, so allowing for automated creation there quickly leads to there being no sane options availble for anybody else.
That being said, we have recently added the ability for our paid customers to create custom bitlinks if they are using a custom domain. In this case, our customers get their own key space so creating custom bitlinks en-mass isn't a problem.
It was removed from the API. I like many others were trying to do this and bit.ly's support email replied saying it has been removed. Similar experiences on their ApiDocumentation wiki here.