I've coded some php which retrieves facebook user ids, stored in my database, and then goes on to request their user names. It all works fine, however this process adds an additonal 1.8 seconds to my pageload, which I would like to avoid if possible.
So I rebuilt the code, and added some javascript which looks for the user ids and then requests the user names. This method runs a lot faster and my page load is 1.8 sec shorter. However in order to make it work I'm adding my app access token to the javascript, which ofcourse is a security black hole
The javascript fb.api call looks like that at the moment
FB.api('/'+userid, {access_token : 'appAccessToken'}, function(response) {
userNameSpan.text(response.name);
});
Is there any other way I can make this work, without falling back to the pure server-side solution which is awfully slow?
I'm getting no answers at all to my questions lately. Anyway, the only other solutions I can think of are ajax calling the php file, which will be requesting the user names itself, or storing the user names in the database along with the user ids.
The ajax solution is problematic for a lot of reasons, mainly because the platform is joomla and the php is a custom module, which means that I will have to either call the file outside of the joomla framework (security issues arise) or build my own helper file for the custom module in order for it to work with the com_ajax component of joomla, which ofcourse is a timesink.
The database solution has the downside that the usernames will not be dynamic, meaning that if a user chnages his/her user name after he/she has been added in the database, the change will not be available to me. I guess I could also store the time the user was inserted in the database and check how much time has passed, and perform a facebook request for his/her username only after a predefined time has passed, and then updating the database if the username has changed. Not quite dynamic, but close enough
If any1 has any other ideas, please don't be shy
Although I'm gonna go for the database solution, I found another solution that can decrease the pageload significantly.
Instead of making an api call for each user, you can do a batch call, requesting info about many users in one call. It is explained here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/making-multiple-requests
That would cut down my calls from 6 to 1. However since reading up a bit about facebook names, I realized they do not change that often any more, so the database solution is better for my case
Related
I am a beginner to web development, and I am trying to do a notification system with AJAX and jQuery.
In my web application, I have a comment system where you can mention another user. After a comment mentioning a certain user has been written, a new entry on my notifications table will be added, containing the comment, the id of the user who commented and the id of the user(s) who will receive the comment. After the notification is stored in the database, I want the person that was mentioned to receive the notification.
To that effect, I decided to use AJAX. Using the setTimeout() method, I am sending an AJAX request to the database every 2 seconds, and with that, I can display the notifications visually to the user that is meant to receive them.
My only concern is that this will slow down the site once I connect it with a server.
So, I was looking for a way that would allow me to implement a notifications system without slowing the site too much, since the one that I am using currently doesn't seem very efficient.
I would appreciate any help.
I am quite new to web development and am working on this social networking site.
Now I want to add functionality to show if a person is online.
Now one of the ways I figure out doing this is by keeping online status bit in the database.
My question is how to do it dynamically. Say the page is loaded and a user (say connection) comes online. How do I dynamically change status of that connection on that page.
I wanted to know if there are any tools(libraries) available for this type of tracking. My site is in python using django framework. I think something can be done using javascript/ jquery . I want to know if I am going in the right direction or is there anything else I should look into?
Create a new model with a last_activity DateTimeField and a OneToOneField to User. Alternatively, if you are subclassing User, using a custom User in django 1.5, or using a user profile, just add the field to that model.
Write a custom middleware that automatically updates the last_activity field for each user on every request.
Write an is_online method in one of your models that uses a timedelta to determine a user's inactivity period to return a boolean for whether they are online. For example, if their last_activity was more than 15 minutes ago, return False.
Write a view that is polled through jQuery ajax to return a particular user's online status.
As Sanjay says, prefer using memory solutions (online statuses have a quite brief use) like the Django cache (Redis or Memcache).
If you want a simple way of updating the online status of an user on an already loaded web page, use any lib like jQuery, AJAX-poll an URL giving the status of an user, and then update the tiny bit of your page showing your wanted status.
Don't poll this page too often, once every 15 seconds seems reasonable.
We send follow up emails for inquiries on our products and I wanted to track how effective they are.
This is my plan:
Update the url in the hyperlink of the email to include a query string like:
href=http://www.somepage.htm?source=fromEmail
And then track how many visits I get with the query string = fromEmail
My problem is that the page is a .htm and I didn't really want to rewrite it so I'm looking for a javascript counter that can accomodate the query string. Ideally I would like to be able to track the total page hits, as well as the hits that come specifically from these emails. Even more ideally I would like be able to track various information in SQL Server so that the person that requested this could do some reporting on it.
Am I going about this the right way or should I just rewrite it in .net (as we are a .net shop)?
While it is definitely possible to put some javascript on your .htm page that fires an AJAX request that increments a SQL counter table if the source=fromEmail, I would say that it is more reliable to have the server increment this counter when serving up the page.
Having the server do the work when the hit originally comes in will also allow you to track more specific information about the request for the report.
Javascript on emails is a no-no. Outlook by default blocks Javascript, so there goes 50% of your users. Other email systems are not keen on running javascript either. Remember, when you're doing HTML emails, you need to think 1995-vintage HTML. Thanks, Microsoft.
You've got a few (ok, but not great) options:
Include an image file on it. When it gets loaded, count it as a hit. This is how all the major services handle email tracking, with a 1px X 1px white image file that they most often place at the bottom of the page. The obvious problem with doing this is that if they use Outlook's preview pane with images enabled, it counts as a hit that they may not have read. If they read it on Gmail while not unblocking images (set to hidden by default) you've got a real hit that doesn't get recorded. So, either way, your numbers are wrong.
Track link clicks by routing links through your server. You use your server to then re-write urls for the browser to follow. Again, it works well enough, but won't capture the real numbers because only a small percentage of people who get an email actually click a link on them. Here's an example using link tagging with Google Analytics
A combination of the two above. It covers both cases, yes, but could result in double counting one user. You could also hybridize the two by setting a variable on each image that could track back to the source email, then store hits in a DB to eliminate dupes. That's a LOT of work, though.
My company sends (and tracks) thousands of emails daily as part of its core business, and we always encourage clients to do emails with "teasers" that draw them into other websites for the main content. Why? The closer we get a user to the main site, the closer we are to a sale--nobody has ever done an ecommerce transaction solely on email yet (that I know of) Also, it's one heck of a lot easier and offers far more options to do tracking via Google Analytics on a site than it is to track emails. Since you can't reliably embed Analytics in emails, your best bet is to get 'em to a website that can.
I am making a cooperation application like google docs, but I found this is different to do on the web. The problem is, when the user typing, another user should see the update at the same time. But what actually behind the screen? Is that when the user have an action, it sent a http request, and write into database. At the same time, another user get the action from database, and rendering the result that the user just type. If use this way to implement, the database need to keep read and write.....apart from this solution, how can I sync two people work on the fly? Thank you.
Check out something like this http://pusherapp.com/
Or http://www.tornadoweb.org/
Both are good at real time pushes without constant AJAX requests that will put a lot of strain on your server
All my research so far suggests this can't be done, but I'm hoping someone here has some cunning ideas.
I have a form on a website which allows users to bulk upload lots of URLs to add to a list on the server. There's quite a lot of server-side processing to do on each URL, so to avoid timeouts and to display progress, I've implemented the upload using jQuery to submit the URLs one at a time using ajax.
This is all working nicely. However, part of the processing on each URL is deduplicating it against the complete list. The ajax call returns a status indicating either a successful upload or a rejection due to duplication. As the upload progresses, I tell the user how many URLs have been rejected as duplicates (along with overall progress and ETA).
The problem now is how to give the user a complete list of the failed duplicate URLs. I've kept them in an array in my jQuery, and would like the user to be able to click on a link on the form to download a text file containing those URLs. Is this possible just using client-side processing?
The server-side processing basically handles a single keyword at a time. I'd rather not have to store the duplicates in a database table with some kind of session key which gets sent with every ajax call, and is then used at the end to generate the text file server-side (and then gets cleaned up some time later). I can see how to do this, but it seems very clunky and a bit 20th century.
I haven't used it myself yet, but Downloadify was built for exactly this purpose I think.
Downloadify is a tiny JavaScript + Flash library that enables the generation and saving of files on the fly, in the browser, without server interaction.
It was created by Doug Neiner who is also pretty active on Stack Overflow.
It needs Flash 10 to work.