Categories
Technology troubleshooting

dynamic goal values in google analytics

Scoring a goal against google is never easy. Google analytics allows you to do some strange and wonderful things, but not without some teeth grinding. I was struggling with this for a little while, and it was a great source of frustration, since there’s hardly any info out there about it. Or maybe there is lots of info, but no solution to this particular problem. I think I finally nailed it.

Dynamic Goal Conversion Values

I was trying to get some dynamic goal conversion values into Analytics. I ended up reading about Ecommerce tracking and it seemed like the way to go. Not only would I be able to pick the goal conversion value dynamically, it gives you a breakdown of each and every transaction. Very nice. After implementing it, I was quite impressed to see each transaction, product, sku etc appear neatly on the ecommerce reports. So far so good. But somehow, goals – which were set on the very same page as the ecommerce tracking code – failed to add the transaction value. The goals were tracked just fine, I could see them adding up, but not the goal value. grrrr…

Categories
Technology wordpress

unicode url double-encoding 404 redirect trick

I’ve come across a small nuisance that seemed to appear occasionally with unicode urls. Some websites seem to encode/escape/quote urls as soon as they see any symbol (particularly % sign). They appear to assume it needs to be encoded, and convert any such character to its URL-Encoded form. For example, percent (%) symbol will convert to %25, ampersand (&) to %26 and so on.

This is not normally a problem, unless the URL is already encoded. Since all unicode-based urls use this encoding, they are more prone to these errors. What happens then is that a URL that looks like this:
http://www.frau-vintage.com/2011/%E3%81%95%E3%81%8F%E3%82%89 …

will be encoded again to this:
http://www.frau-vintage.com/2011/%25E3%2581%2595%25E3%25 …

So clicking on such a double-encoded link will unfortunately lead to a 404 page (don’t try it with the links above, because the workaround was already applied there).

A workaround

This workaround is specific to wordpress 404.php, but can be applied quite easily in other frameworks like django, drupal, and maybe even using apache htaccess rule(?).


<?php 
/* detecting 'double-encoded' urls
 *  if the request uri contain %25 (the urlncoded form of '%' symbol)
 *  within the first few characeters, we try to decode the url and redirect
 */
$pos = strpos($_SERVER&#91;'REQUEST_URI'&#93;,'%25');
if ($pos!==false && $pos < 10) :
    header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location:" . urldecode($_SERVER&#91;'REQUEST_URI'&#93;)); 
else:
    get_header(); ?>
    <h2>Error 404 - Page Not Found</h2>
    <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
    <?php get_footer(); 
endif; ?>

This is placed only in the 404 page. It then grabs the request URI and checks if it contains the string ‘%25’ within the first 10 characters (you can modify the check to suit your needs). If it finds it, it redirects to a urldecoded version of the same page…

Categories
django monitoring optimization python Technology

django memory leaks, part II

On my previous post I talked about django memory management, the little-known maxrequests parameter in particular, and how it can help ‘pop’ some balloons, i.e. kill and restart some django processes in order to release some memory. On this post I’m going to cover some of the things to do or avoid in order to keep memory usage low from within your code. In addition, I am going to show at least one method to monitor (and act automatically!) when memory usage shoots through the roof.

Categories
django monitoring optimization python Technology

django memory leaks, part I

A while ago I was working on optimizing memory use for some django instances. During that process, I managed to better understand memory management within django, and thought it would be nice to share some of those insights. This is by no means a definitive guide. It’s likely to have some mistakes, but I think it helped me grasp the configuration options better, and allowed easier optimization.

Does django leak memory?

In actual fact, No. It doesn’t. The title is therefore misleading. I know. However, if you’re not careful, your memory usage or configuration can easily lead to exhausting all memory and crashing django. So whilst django itself doesn’t leak memory, the end result is very similar.

Memory management in Django – with (bad) illustrations

Lets start with the basics. Lets look at a django process. A django process is a basic unit that handles requests from users. We have several of those on the server, to allow handling more than one request at the time. Each process however handles one request at any given time.

But lets look at just one.

cute, isn’t it? it’s a little like a balloon actually (and balloons are generally cute). The balloon has a certain initial size to allow the process to do all the stuff it needs to. Lets say this is balloon size 1.