Today we are "extending" the "Launch - Make an Extension" mini series. This article arose out of a lab I ran at the Adobe Summit in London. There is a lot of overlap, but two major differences, too: 1. This article walks you through building an Extension on a Mac and using Visual Studio Code …
The Mechanics of Loading Analytics Code with DTM
Yes, I know, Launch. But I had this post in the pipeline for some time now, and here you go. As a bonus, I have noted where Launch, by Adobe, handles things differently. If you came here from my "battle post", then this is some background that'll help you understand why I wrote the other …
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Testing with ChromeDriver
Good news, I have changed my testing framework to use ChromeDriver rather than HTMLUnit. HTMLUnit didn't cut it, and rather than going back to phantomJS — which hasn't been updated in quite a while — I decided to do the right thing ™. The only downside: there is currently no way to filter. I know …
The Era of Server-side Everything
I had a slightly shocking, and certainly eye-opening moment a month ago or so. I was chatting with Cornell, who is not only my colleague, but also probably the best Target consultant I know. He shocked me by casually saying that he thinks the future of A/B testing and targeting is server-side. As a developer, …
Quick Tip – Experience Cloud direct URLs
I'm at Summit in Las Vegas this week, but the little robots behind this blog will post this anyway. And if you want to meet, let me know! The quick tip today is indeed a very quick quick tip. Just one sentence, really: You can access some of the solutions in the Experience Cloud directly! …
Switch off DTM server-side
There's a monster hiding under our beds right now, called "GDPR". Since I am not a lawyer, I will not write about GDPR, but I'll happily use it as bait. 😉 Seriously, though, GDPR is a great reminder that in our business (analytics, optimisation, but actually the web in general), privacy is a topic, and …
Project Management, Development, and Analytics
Note: this article is relevant for you if you have ever, or are likely to participate in a bigger project that includes building the platform as well as deploying Analytics, Target, Audience Management, or similar tools. I think it is relevant for developers as well as project managers. Often, we Analytics people are tasked with …
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Dynamic Variables – still a thing?
In April 2013, I wrote about "Dynamic Variables", a mechanism that helps remove duplication in the tracking URLs, making the tracking requests potentially shorter. Even at the time, the original reason for doing so was no longer a show stopper: Internet Explorer up to version 9 had the annoying habit of not requesting any URLs …
Data Quality & Testing – Some Thoughts from Others
I want to share two articles with you that I felt nicely threw spotlights on testing. The first one, called TDD & "Professionalism" (I love that title!) by Jason Gorman, builds a Venn diagram based on 4 values, or 4 corner stones of what the author calls "professional". A "professional" "doesn't ship untested code", "doesn't …
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Launch – Make an Extension – Debugging
Here comes part 3 of the mini series on "Making a Launch Extension". We looked at the setup and the coding. Today we discuss debugging. I'm sure you are way better than me when it comes to writing HTML and Javascript, but I'm also sure whatever you write is unlikely to work first time round. …
