Playback Papertrail Audit Logs

We use paper_trail quite often, it’s a wonderful gem and generally part of our standard suite for business apps, we primarily use it for audit logging, today we needed to get data out of this history

There are quite a few ways to do this, from having daily server backups or parsing logs. They all have there quirks, so does this solution.  In this example we want to playback and take a snapshot of our orders table, let’s say value grouped by status.

Using Olark for In-App Annoucments

Anyone who supports a web application find themselves with a need to get users pumped about new features, or explain a downtime. And one thing that using Olark over the years is that conversations are always better.

Olark has a feature that can easily be abused to produce In-App Announcements, that are app, and or page specific.   The basic idea is that for every visitor (unique), we send them a message of our announcement, and we link to our blog for further details.

Shows the various settings required to use olark as in-app annoucments.Shows the various settings required to use olark as in-app annoucments.

 

In our example,

  1. We only want to message the user why someone is on to answer questions
  2. When they are a specific application (we support a lot of applications)
  3. And the important one, “Once per unique visitor”

Gets you this, hopefully with a more useful message

Screenshot 2015-10-19 10.08.58

 

Learn more about Olark or just chat with us! Olark is in the bottom right!

Introducing PDFthisDomain

Inspiration

The other day I had a client ask for a print out of the website, He was hoping to be able to mark stuff up by hand. As a sympathizer of old school paper and it’s merits I almost immediately said sure, not really sure what I was getting myself into.

A long story short after a good amount of searching for a tool to speed the process along, there isn’t a web service / program that will just turn a live website into a pdf. Well I guess that shouldn’t be too hard to make…

Hacking Time

PDFthisDomain is a very simple Sinatra app that has three components. A Sinatra app, a redis instance and a single worker. A user is first prompted to enter a URL which I quickly spider using anemone a sweet ruby web crawling gem. Once the spider is complete you see a list of urls that are available for rendering. Select which urls you want and enter a valid email, and off it goes to background processing. When the render is complete you should get a link to a zip file on S3 for you to download.

PS: Emails are only stored until

your job is complete. No worries 😉

Websites are an investment, not an expense!

Website are supposed to provide your company with a presence on the web. Alot of tradiontal business owners view this as an expense: Development costs, monthly maintenance cost, etc.

We have a very different perspective, Yes, it’s about the dollars but,

the purpose of a website is to work for you and make you money, not waste it.

Just like leasing a building for your store, your website needs to inspire and drive clients to your company. It is an absolutely critical piece of marketing. In this day in age, many consumers consult the internet before purchasing anything. If a company does not have a functional and well designed website many consumers can be driven away and not reassured in a quality product or service.

Give us a call or drop us an email and lets talk about ways we can revamp your website, or maybe help you with an online business plan. Either way, we have a solution for you and technology should not be in your way…or be an expense.

CRM Plugin Admits Defeat

So this grand idea apparently had some fundamental flaws.

It required the browser to be open… Seems simple but how often is it that a vistor simply closes a chat window?

The method

that I had been planning to use collapse when thought about in this manner, how can

I parse the DOM if

there is no DOM to parse.

 

So sadly this will be shelved. Hopefully the guys over at Olark will either build a Chat Transcript API, or start developing CRM plugins on their end. Unfortunately we can’t do it with what we are provided.

 

 

 

 

Posted via email from BurningPony Blog

Build an Olark CRM (Fat Free) extension

The goal.

Dynamically Push Conversation Objects from Olark to a CRM of choice…. Current goal will be the fat free CRM.

Currently the Olark API does not provide the most helpful API to get the full conversation but we still should be able to capture the Conversation div that contains the chat.

Basic Functionality

  1. Command From Operator !crm save
  2. Capture Conversation DIV
  3. Parse out HTML
  4. Search CRM for existing client by email
    1. If Exists save the chat to the clients info
    2. Notify Operator/provide link
  5. If it does not create a new person in CRM
  6. Provide link to operator to complete new entry

End Scope for the plugin

Beyond the basic scope, we would really like for the system to immediately pull data from the CRM and update the chat vistors name. Then provide any relevant links to the operator either by notification or by updating the visitors status message.

 

This could be done with no commands but I am not sure if it would create to many malformed entries in the CRM.