Rookie S3 user here looking to troubleshoot a problem I encountered while helping some friends with their business. Their business revolves around selling courses and the program they use is WooCommerce and they attach course files through WordPress. The way these courses work is that there is a live video call where people like to join in so the product on WooCommerce initially holds the details for the upcoming call and afterward additional audio and transcripts are added to the product for sale. The problem is that this means people who had bought the course prior to this call would not receive these files unless permission to see them was manually given. As this is redundant and troublesome, my thought was to change the purchase to instead give a link which goes into an Amazon S3 bucket labeled courses and give them access to a specific folder within it. Ideally, this link would let them see new files lives and furthermore would limit the size of data on the website which is hosted on a dedicated server (save some $$$ on hosting fees, 2 birds 1 stone) The problem however is that since I am a complete novice to this style of coding, I am unsure of how to do this although I do think it is possible given an answer is already out there or if I can bull and jam my way through a section of code. The reason I am looking to sort out courses as folders inside a bucket instead of individual buckets is that the number of courses the website currently has is nearing 200 and if an effort was made to change those then it would be well over the 100 bucket limit in addition to being an exercise in repetition. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
If I understand you correctly, you want to host content on S3, but want to achieve some degree of access control on that content.
The most straightforward way to do this, the one that involves minimal S3 integration, is to presign an S3 url for the user. the presigned url would be good for a limited time and could be generated directly before redirecting the user to that URL by your wordpress site, which would in turn hold aws access credentials.
https://docs.amazonaws.cn/zh_cn/aws-sdk-php/guide/latest/service/s3-presigned-url.html eplains more about this from a php perspective, which I'm guessing is the right lens for you.
This allows some modicum of access control ( the users can still share the document after they've accessed it, but at least it's not just public).
If you don't need access control, you can make the s3 object public and omit the signing altogether.
So the following which I'm writing is just to discuss whether something like this is even possible or if any of you would have any better ideas/suggestions or understanding how this might work. I thank anyone who takes time to read this in advance and I hope I don't explain myself too incoherently:
Let's say I have a page in WordPress which has a little bit of text and a video. Basicly I would like to share that page's link or I'd want to forward that page via e-mail to a certain group of people (let's say 10-50 specifically chosen people) and I want to track who of them opened the link and for how long they were on the page or watched the video.
I would like to make this happen in a way that I wouldn't have to make 50 different pages or 50 different URLs for each person (or 50 different tracking strings for that matter). Or that I wouldn't have to take a newsletter-mailer type page in between this process.
Basicly, I would like to make the sharing/forwarding and analytics overview process as easy as possible, so that an admin or moderator wouldn't have to check too many different pages to get the info.
I really appreciate any and all feedback.
[Also really sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. Please feel free to redirect me to a corresponding slot].
Technically, Google Analytics isn't meant to be used to track this specifically- it's typically meant to track groups of anonymized users. That being said, it is capable of doing this (but may not be as automated as you had hoped).
You are correct in thinking that you'd either need to duplicate the pages or create multiple different campaign URLs.
The other thing to keep in mind is that as emails are forwarded, there is no way to update the URL after the email has been sent, so if you email me and I forward it to someone else who clicks through, you're going to think someone else is me.
One way around this would be if you know your users IP addresses (not only is that a big "if", but it can also be spoofed), or some other uniquely identifying feature (any chance these people have signed-up through your website and have actual user IDs? That'd make things infinitely easier!).
Maybe you could customize the email to add their email address as a query string? That could still require a lot of work (and you couldn't just share a single link).
Now, you can not store personally identifiable info in GA (including IP and email addresses), but at the server-level you could assign a custom dimension with a uniquely generated ID and send that to GA. Now you've got all the info you need!
Unfortunately this method only works if you can detect some kind of "fingerprint" of your users.
Unfortunately what you described isn't quite what Google Analytics was designed to do. If you wanted to get into detailed user-specific tracking, I'd advise you look into a CRM. Those systems are designed specifically for user tracking as you described.
Hope that gets you pointed in the right direction.
google has an API for downloading search suggestions:
https://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/xml_reference/query_suggestion.html
unfortunately, as far as i can tell, these results are specific to your location. for an analysis, i would like to be able to define the city/location that google thinks it is making the suggestion to. here's what happens when i scrape from dar es salaam, tanzania:
http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=insurance
["insurance",["insurance","insurance companies in tanzania","insurance group of tanzania","insurance principles","insurance act","insurance policy","insurance act tanzania","insurance act 2009","insurance definition","insurance industry in tanzania"]]
i understand that a vpn would partially solve this issue, but only by giving me a different location and not lots of locations. is there a reasonable way to replicate this sort of thing quickly and easily from, say, the 100 largest cities in the united states?
confirmation that results differ within the usa-
thanks!
Google will use your IP and your location history (if turned on) to determine your location.
To be able to go around it, you can spoof your IP while logged off your google account (but I don't know if google will consider it a trial of hacking no matter what your intentions are).
Another way is to use Tor browser (even though it is not it's original purpose). You can configure tor to exit from a certain country using the Exitnode parameter in the torrc config file
As found in the docs:
ExitNodes node,node,…
A list of identity fingerprints, country codes, and address patterns of nodes to use as exit node
But if you want a fast way to do it, I don't think that's possible since google wants to know the real location of the users and have put a lot of effort into making such tricks fail.
The hl param for interface language changes the search results, but I can't tell if it's actually changing the location. For example:
http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=chrome&q=why&hl=FR
Here's an example with 5 different values of hl:
http://jsbin.com/tusacufaza/edit?js,output
The task is simple, and the answers might be many.
But here goes: On my website I'll make an InfoAboutYou.aspx page. So far i got the IP and the browser name and version, but ill like to expand, with just about every thing i can look up about the curret user/ip and hes Browser/OS
Does it exists any free webservices that kan lookup more information about a specific IP?
The idea is to see how specific a random user can be pin pointet
Thank you
You can use various service to determine a geographic location.
One example is:-
http://www.ipgeo.com/
There are plenty of things that you can determine by using JavaScript and having it post back to the server like some of the stats that Google Analytics does. You can determine screen size, etc.
Important: This question isn't actually really an ASP.NET question. Anyone who knows anything about URLS can answer it. I just happen to be using ASP.NET routing so included that detail.
In a nutshell my question is :
"What URL format should I design that i can give to external parties to get to a specific place on my site that will be future proof. [I'm new to creating these 'REST' URLs]."
I need an ASP.NET routing URL that will be given to a third party for tracking marketing campaigns. It is essentially a 'gateway' URL that redirects the user to a specific page on our site which may be the homepage, a special contest or a particular product.
In addition to trying to capture the referrer I will need to receive a partnerId, a campaign number and possibly other parameters. I want to provide a route to do this BUT I want to get it right first time because obviously I cant easily change it once its being used externally.
How does something like this look?
routes.MapRoute(
"3rd-party-campaign-route",
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
new
{
controller = "Campaign",
action = "Redirect",
custom = (string)null // optional so we need to set it null
}
);
campaign : possibly don't want the word 'campaign' in the actual link -- since users will see it in the URL bar. i might change this to just something cryptic like 'c'.
destination : dictates which page on our site the link will take the user to. For instance PR to direct the user to products page.
partnerid : the ID for the company that we've assigned - such as SO for Stack overflow.
campaignid : campaign id such as 123 - unique to each partner. I have realized that I think I'd prefer for the 3rd party company to be able to manage the campaign ids themselves rather than us providing a website to 'create a campaign'. I'm not
completely sure about this yet though.
custom : custom data (optional). i can add further custom data parameters without breaking existing URLS
Note: the reason i have 'destination' is because the campaign ID is decided upon by the client so they need to also tell us where the destination of that campaign is. Alternatively they could 'register' a campaign with us. This may be a better solution to avoid people putting in random campaign IDs but I'm not overly concerned about that and i think this system gives more flexibility.
In addition we want to know perhaps which image they used to link to us (so we can track which banner works the best). I THINK this is a candiate for a new campaignid as opposed to a custom data field but i'm not sure.
Currently I am using a very primitive URL such as http://example.com?cid=123. In this case the campaign ID needs to be issued to the third party and it just isn't a very flexible system. I want to move immediately to a new system for new clients.
Any thoughts on future proofing this system? What may I have missed? I know i can always add new formats but I want to use this format as much as possible if that is a good idea.
This URL:
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
...doesn't look like a resource to me, it looks like a remote method call. There is a lot of business logic here which is likely to change in the future. Also, it's complicated. My gut instinct when designing URLs is that simpler is generally better. This goes double when you are handing the URL to an external partner.
Uniform Resource Locators are supposed to specify, well, resources. The destination is certainly a resource (but more on this in a moment), and I think you could consider the campaign a resource. The partner is not a resource you serve. Custom is certainly not a resource, as it's entirely undefined.
I hear what you're saying about not wanting to have to tell the partners to "create a campaign," but consider that you're likely to eventually have to go down this road anyway. As soon as the campaign has any properties other than the partner identifier, you pretty much have to do this.
So my first to conclusions are that you should probably get rid of the partner ID, and derive it from the campaign. Get rid of custom, too, and use query string parameters instead, should it be necessary. It is appropriate to use query string parameters to specify how to return a resource (as opposed to the identity of the resource).
Removing those yields:
"campaign/{destination}/{campaignid}",
OK, that's simpler, but it still doesn't look right. What's destination doing in between campaign and campaign ID? One approach would be to rearrange things:
"campaign/{campaignid}/{destination}",
Another would be to use Astoria-style indexing:
"campaign({campaignid})/{destination}",
For some reason, this looks odd to a lot of people, but it's entirely legal. Feel free to use other legal characters to separate campaign from the ID; the point here is that a / is not the only choice, and may not be the appropriate choice.
However...
One question we haven't covered yet is what should happen if/when the user submits a valid destination, but an invalid campaign or partner ID. If the correct response is that the user should see an error, then all of the above is still valid. If, on the other hand, the correct response is that the user should be silently taken to the destination page anyway, then the campaign ID is really a query string parameter, not a part of the resource. Perhaps some partners wouldn't like being given a URL with a question mark in it, but from a purely REST point of view, I think that's the right approach, if the campaign ID's validity does not determine where the user ends up. In this case, the URL would be:
"campaign/{destination}",
...and you would add a query string parameter with the campaign ID.
I realize that I haven't given you a definite answer to your question. The trouble is that most of this rests on business considerations which you are probably aware of, but I'm certainly not. So I'm more trying to cover the philosophy of a REST-ful URL, rather than attempting to explain your business to you. :)
I think the URL rewriting is getting out of hand a little bit lately. Not everything belongs to the URL. After all, a URL is supposed to describe a resource that can be searched for, discovered or manipulated and it seems to me that at least the partner ID and the custom fields from above are not part of the resource.
Not to mention that that at some point you would like to actually keep the partner ID constant across multiple campaigns and that means that it is now orthogonal to the particular places they need to visit. If you keep these as parameters, you will allow your partners to access uniformly multiple resources on your website, while still reliably identifying themselves, so you can track their participation in any of your campaigns.
It looks like you've covered all of your bases. The only suggestion I have is to change
{custom}
to
{*custom}
That way, if you ever need to accept further parameters, you don't have to take the chance that old URLs will get a 404. For example:
If you have a URL that looks like:
campaign/PR/SO/123
and you decide in the future that you would like to accept a fourth and fifth parameter:
campaign/PR/SO/123/blah/foo
then the first URL will still be valid, because you're using a wildcard character in {*custom}. "blah/foo" would be passed as a string to your action. To get those extra two parameters, you would simply split the custom argument in your action by '/'. Add some friendly error handling if they don't exist and you've successfully changed the amount of information you can receive with a campaign URL without completely breaking URLs already in the wild.
Why not use URL encoded variables instead of routes? They're a lot more flexible - you can add any new features in the future while still maintaining 100% backwards compatibility. Admittedly, it's a little more trouble to type manually, but if there's all those parameters anyway, it's already no picnic.
http://mysite.com/page?campaign=1&dest=products&pid=15&cid=25
To me, this is much more indicative of what is really going on. Using paths implies a that a resource exists at that location. But really you're just providing a web service with various parameters, and this model captures that much more clearly. And in the future, you can add more parameters effortlessly. You can also default parameters if they are missing without messing anything up.
Not sure of the code in ASP, but it should be trivial to implement.
I think I'd look at doing it the way that SO does it's questions.
"campaign/{campaign-id}/friendly-name-of-campaign"
Create a mapping in your database when the campaign is created that associates all the data you need with an automatically generated id. The friendly name could be assigned basically the same way as a question is on SO -- by the user -- but you could also have an approval process that makes sure that it meets your requirements and is distinct from any existing campaign names. Your tracking company can track by the id and you can correlate that with your associated data with a simple look up.
What you have looks good for your needs. The other posts here have good points. But may not be suitable for you. One thing that you could consider with future proofing your links is to put a version number somewhere in there.
"campaign/{version}/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}"
This way if you decide to completely change your format you can up the version to 2.0 (or whatever) and still keep track of the old links coming in.
I would do
/c/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/?customvar=s
You should think about the hierarchy of the first parameters, you already got that managed quite well. Only if there's a hierarchy path segments should be used.
From your description, destination seems to be the broadest parameter, partnerid only works with destination, and campaingid is specific to a partner.
When you really need to add custom parameters I would go for query variables (they are not forbidden in REST), because these are not part of the hierarchy.
You also shouldn't try to be too RESTful here. After all, it's for a campaign and for redirecting to a final resource. So the URL you want to design here is not really a specific resource in the terms of REST.
Create an URL called http://mysite.com/gateway
Return an HTML form, tell your partners to fill in the form and POST it. Redirect based on the form values.
You could easily provide your partners with the javascript to do the GET and POST. Should be trivial.
The most important thing i have learned about REST URL´s thats usually burried deep in some book or article:
The URL should point to a resource and the following ?querystring should have all the scoping information needed. DONT mix those two or you will have a design thats very hard to work with.
Other then that i fully agree with Craig Stuntz