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.
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.
In our example,
Gets you this, hopefully with a more useful message
Learn more about Olark or just chat with us! Olark is in the bottom right!
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…
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 😉
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.
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.
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
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.
