Tracking and Testing for Ajax and Heavy Client Web 2.0

This week eBay hosted the Annual Developer Conference in San Jose. Mark Boyd, from eRL, spoke at the conference on the topic of Tracking and Testing for Ajax and Heavy Client Web 2.0. He spoke about how, using Tripod (for free hosting), Ajax for client-server interaction, and cgi for pixel tracking a seller can track visitors to ones’ listings. This is a quick start process with no additional hardware requirement. He also discussed seller-side A/B testing to discover different usability choices and techniques for detecting group interaction. The talk was very well received by the developer community.

eBay Platform Feedback Forum Devcon 2010

Kristina Klausen mentioned that seller releases were working well, with sellers feeling informed and satisfied with advance notice of changes that happen. She mentioned that often requirements and changes are discussed far ahead of the changes occuring, with time to test the changes in sandbox and in production before a change is fully committed. Bhaven discussed improvements to the sandbox including availability, evolutions to include more APIs and functions to make it as close to production as possible. Kristina asked "what else can we do to continue to make this a world-class sandbox" and she was open to continued suggestions. Bhaven talked about the alerts API and notifications and expanding the suite of alerts that are allowable. The APIs are fully UTF-8 compliant currently.

Open eBay Apps - One Year later. A developer's perspective - Session Comments

At an eBay DevCon session on June 10th, 2010, the top developers for the Open Applications platform discussed their experiences. All of the developers were pleased that access to Open eBay Applications was now publicized through the "Applications" tab for all sellers, making it quick and easy to direct users to and sign them up for using these applications. The developers mentioned that the restrictions were few and seemed reasonable (such as limiting links to those directly needed for the application, avoiding links that market off-eBay functions). Applications need to be high quality, have good documentation and FAQ, and apps support is expected. Even though the subscription prices are low, the expectations of users are similar to expectations users have of eBay generally, and apps support needs to accomodate that expectation.

Tracking Pixel CGI-BIN code

#!/usr/bin/perl

($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)=gmtime(time);

local ($buffer, @pairs, @pairArray, $ii, $pushString, $pair, $name, $value, %FORM);
# Read in text
$ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/;
if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq "GET")
{
$buffer = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
}

$log = "log9.txt";
if ( (-e "$log") && (-r "$log") && (-w "$log") )
{
# Add a new line to the log9.txt file
open(COUNT, ">>$log") || die "Problem: $!";
printf COUNT "%4d-%02d-%02d-%02d:%02d:%02d,",$year+1900,$mon+1,$mday,$hour,$min,$sec;
print COUNT "$buffer\n";
close(COUNT);
}

open IMAGE, "1by1.JPG";
#assume is a gif...
my ($image, $buff);
while(read IMAGE, $buff, 1024) {
$image .= $buff;
}
close IMAGE;
print "Content-type: image/jpeg\n\n";
print $image;

1;