How to deal with aggressive site crawler bots.

If you have a website that is being relentlessly attacked by bot farms. Try adding this line to the bottom of your site’s htaccess file. If you do not see the bot listed, then you can simply add on to this list.

BrowserMatchNoCase (libwww-perl|wget|LieBaoFast|Mb2345Browser|zh-CN|Kinza|Bytespider|Baiduspider|Sogou|Datanyze|AspiegelBot|adscanner|serpstatbot|spaziodat|undefined) bad_bot

How to Configure Shopify Conversion Tracking

https://docs.shopify.com/manual/settings/checkout/google-adwords





SilverStripe Report Export to CSV Error

The export columns need to be set in order for the csv generator to function properly.

Updating getReportField() in cms/code/report/Report.php like below will fix this issue

 

public function getReportField() {
// TODO Remove coupling with global state
$params = isset($_REQUEST[‘filters’]) ? $_REQUEST[‘filters’] : array();
$items = $this->sourceRecords($params, null, null);
$exportButton = new GridFieldExportButton(‘buttons-after-left’);

$gridFieldConfig = GridFieldConfig::create()->addComponents(
new GridFieldToolbarHeader(),
new GridFieldSortableHeader(),
new GridFieldDataColumns(),
new GridFieldPaginator(),
new GridFieldButtonRow(‘after’),
new GridFieldPrintButton(‘buttons-after-left’),
$exportButton
);
$gridField = new GridField(‘Report’,false, $items, $gridFieldConfig);
$columns = $gridField->getConfig()->getComponentByType(‘GridFieldDataColumns’);
$displayFields = array();
$fieldCasting = array();
$fieldFormatting = array();

// Parse the column information
foreach($this->columns() as $source => $info) {
if(is_string($info)) $info = array(‘title’ => $info);

if(isset($info[‘formatting’])) $fieldFormatting[$source] = $info[‘formatting’];
if(isset($info[‘csvFormatting’])) $csvFieldFormatting[$source] = $info[‘csvFormatting’];
if(isset($info[‘casting’])) $fieldCasting[$source] = $info[‘casting’];

if(isset($info[‘link’]) && $info[‘link’]) {
$fieldFormatting[$source] = function($value, &$item) {
return sprintf(
‘%s‘,
Controller::join_links(singleton(‘CMSPageEditController’)->Link(‘show’), $item->ID),
$value
);
};
}

$displayFields[$source] = isset($info[‘title’]) ? $info[‘title’] : $source;
}
$columns->setDisplayFields($displayFields);
$columns->setFieldCasting($fieldCasting);
$columns->setFieldFormatting($fieldFormatting);
$exportButton->setExportColumns($displayFields);
return $gridField;
}

 

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost Referrals

If you have unrealistic traffic in your Google Analytics or you see some Referral URLs that seem a little fishy, then likely they do not belong. These websites are called Ghost Referrals and they clog up your analytics account with junk data. For a more accurate representation of your site’s realistic analytics you need to create filters in order to remove these Ghosts.

Known List of Referral Spam

Google Analytics Regular Expressions
floating-share-buttons.com|free-social-buttons.com|4webmasters.org|trafficmonetizer.org|traffic2money.com|free-floating-buttons.com|get-free-social-traffic.com|event-tracking.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com|chinese-amezon.com|e-buyeasy.com

.*((darodar|priceg|buttons\-for(\-your)?\-website|makemoneyonline|blackhatworth|hulfingtonpost|o\-o\-6\-o\-o|(social|(simple|free|floating)\-share)\-buttons)\.com|econom\.co|ilovevitaly(\.co(m)?)|(ilovevitaly(\.ru))|(humanorightswatch|guardlink)\.org).*

.*((best(websitesawards|\-seo\-(solution|offer))|get\-free(\-social)?\-traffic(\-now)?|googlsucks)\.com|(domination|torture)\.ml|((rapidgator\-)?(general)?porn(hub(\-)?forum)?|4webmasters)\.(ga|tk|org|uni)|(buy\-cheap\-online)\.info).*

.*((event\-tracking|semalt(media)?|(100dollars|success)\-seo|chinese\-amezon|e\-buyeasy|theguardlan|webmaster\-traffic)\.com|traffic(monetize(r)?|2money)\.(org|com)|pops\.foundation|erot\.co).*

Additional Resources

Technical Specifications & Tasks for Creating Effective HTML Emails

  • Plan your slices and table nesting
  • Slice images and optimize for web. Photos/Textures as JPGs, Icons as transparent PNGs, flatter bitmap looking images as GIFs
  • Convert as much text as possible from PSD to HTML text. Should be greater than 85% HTML text.
  • Use inline styles instead of CSS style rules
  •  Fix the breaks from Photoshop. Small “L”‘s will appear in Dreamweaver. They need to be replaced with a space or a
    depending on how the designer intended the line to break.
  • Convert curved apostrophes and quotation marks. Do a find and replace on these. Replace with manually entered versions from the keyboard.
  • Set most td cells to vertically align to the top
  • HTML list items do not work in all email clients so they need to be done as multi-column tables.
  • On paragraphs set top, left and right margins to zero. Use only bottom margins for spacing between paragraphs. Typically paragraphs will have 15px bottom spacing and headlines will have 25px margin:0 0 15px 0 Note on margin: Top Left Bottom Right

Fix for odd horizontal blocks or image misalignment:
Tag: td
CSS: font-size:1px; line-height:0; margin:0; padding:0;
Reason: It resets the font for the cell so that the image in the cell and/or empty space( ) does not get the default font applied from web based email applications (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook.com).

Fix for images specifically in Yahoo
Tag: img
CSS: display:block

Email Marketing Guidelines (HTML)

SUBJECT LINE

  • Maximum 80 Characters
  • Most important words should appear in the first 5-7 words
  • HTML not allowed in the subject line

EMAIL CONTENT – TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

  • Format: HTML
  • Maximum file size: 150KB (html + images)
  • Recommended width: 500 – 700 pixels
  • Recommended height: 500 – 1000 pixels
  • Use inline-CSS only
  • All the content must reside BETWEEN <body> and </body>

o    Some email clients purge everything outside of <body> tag, including the attributes defined in <body> tag.

  • Image formats allowed: GIF or JPEG only
  • All the graphics used must be 72dpi
  • Text: Maximum 300 words

**NOT ALLOWED**

  • Background images
  • Nested background colors
  • Flash, or other plugins
  • Javascript
  • Animated GIF
  • BMP, TIFF, and any other formats besides PNG, GIF or JPEG
  • <object>, <embed>, <form>, <style>, <script> tags
  • CSS floats, CSS positioning
  • Web Fonts as HTML, use default System fonts

DESIGN TIPS

  • Instead of using cellpadding to create margins, use <div style=”margin:5px”>.
  • All the hex numbers for colors must start with #.
  • Defined alt attribute in all the main images.
  • Include the most important message at the top of the email.
  • Use text instead of graphic for your tagline or important message.
  • The email should make sense even without the graphics for those recipient who block images by default.
  • Avoid thick borders, spam-like words, and excessively large fonts

PLEASE NOTE
There really isn’t a standard for HTML email. What appears fine in one email client doesn’t look right in another. This makes it almost impossible to create a dynamic HTML email that will display well in every email client application.
The guideline provided above will help ensure your mailing will appear as intended ( or close to it ) on major email clients such as MS Outlook 2003, MS Outlook 2007, Hotmail, Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and AOL.

Different email clients have different limitations and restrictions. To list a few –

  • Outlook 2007 does not support:

o    Animated GIF, background images, nested background colors

o    CSS floats, CSS positioning

  • Yahoo! Mail and Gmail:

o    Renders only the content between <body> tags