Quick poll: What should I tackle next?

Each new year, I tend to dive into some new side project (this is how the Beacon Parser and the PocketSDR came about). I have quite a few things I want to tackle right now, and one main thing I’m slowly plugging away at, but in the meantime, I’m wondering what to prioritize. So, a poll:

Any other ideas (or desired improvements to existing tools)? Let me know in the comments.

Beacon Parser again!

Some new updates in the beacon parser:

  • Fixed a bug that prevented heartbeat beacons from tracking
  • Made it possible to remove beacon columns
  • Added API functionality, which can pull down your report suite IDs and custom variable names using the Adobe Admin API.

A huge thanks to this summit lab session for hints on using JSON/AJAX on the API.

Let me know how it works for you!

Beacon Parser round 3

First, you’ll notice a new look and feel for both the blog and the parser- I’m trying to give it a more uniform look.

Functionally, the biggest changes in this go-around are:

  • Variables and parameter should keep a clean, sorted order.
  • You can highlight values in older beacons that don’t match the most current beacon.
  • You can change display options before submitting your first beacon.
  • Display options now include friendly names and variable descriptions, taken largely from this Adobe help article.
  • I fixed some bugs with exporting to CSV and the products string.

Beacon Parser: Round One

I’ve had two major frustrations while troubleshooting and doing QA for clients lately:
1. The new POST beacons don’t split up prettily in debuggers (like Charles proxy).
2. Even if they did, it can be hard to compare beacons to each other if they don’t have the same number of variables.
So, as a pet project in the evenings, I’ve been working on a tool to solve for these problems. Today I introduce: the Beacon Parser!

I don’t consider it done yet, but it’s ready for Beta testing, perhaps. I am positive there are probably better ways to accomplish what I’ve done- I’m no development genius- but I must say i’m pretty happy with the result. I would love for a few folks to provide feedback, if possible.

Current Features:

  • If you enter multiple beacons, It aligns rows for similar variables across beacons.
  • You can export the table to a “csv” file. Note, in certain browsers (including firefox), you will need to add the “.csv” extension to the downloaded filename.
  • If your beacon includes “varName.”/”.varName” variables (clickmap, context data), it will concatenate all the currently “open” variables to output one variable/value pair:
    parserExample

Features I’m still working on (in order of ambitiousness):

  • I definitely still need to work out some bugs (see bottom of this post).
  • It doesn’t currently work great with incomplete beacons.
  • A “clear button”.
  • I’d like to sort the variables back to their original order- currently as you add new beacons that have variables the previous beacons did not, it just adds them to the end.
  • I’d like to have columns for notes on the purpose of the variable, and data quality if there’s anything clearly broken (like character limits being exceeded).
  • I’d love to connect to the Admin API and return the names of custom variables.

I’d also love to create a W3C data layer parser.

Known bugs (already). I will try to fix sometime this evening:

  • It breaks when the current or referring URL has query params in it. Kind of a big problem.
  • It struggles with some products strings.