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Responsive Ads in the Real World: Ad Server Implementation - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/responsive-ads-real-world-ad-server-implementation
February 19, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. Responsive Ads in the Real World: Ad Server Implementation. The last time I wrote about responsive design advertising I put together a few examples. I’m guessing that most developers have not worked closely with ad servers and many may not be familiar with the technology behind web advertising at all. So before I get into it I’ll say a few brief. Things about the advertising ecosystem and how ad servers generally work. How ad servers work. Positions or zones for each ad...
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Tracking iOS Web App Usage - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/tracking-ios-web-app-usage
October 3, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. Tracking iOS Web App Usage. Via a handful of meta tags and link tags, web apps on iOS can be launched from the home screen and run in fullscreen mode to enable a more native-like experience for the user. Turning your website or app into a “home screen web app” is not difficult but it does require a chunk of work. So I’m going to show some examples of how to track home screen web app activity using Google Analytics custom variables. Depending on what exactly you ...Remembe...
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Third-Party Cookies Explained - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/third-party-cookies
May 13, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. For reasons I don’t understand, the subject of HTTP cookies tends to attract confusion, vague understanding, and outright misinformation. For instance, you may have read that cookies are scripts, or “programs”, or software, all of which are untrue. You may have read that cookies can transmit viruses or install malware on your computer. Also untrue. There’s no such thing as a third-party cookie. The thing to understand is that there is no intrinsic difference. Between a first...
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Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/static-cookieless-domain
February 23, 2010 By Rob Flaherty. Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain. Serving static content from a cookieless domain is a standard performance best practice, one you’ve surely encountered if you’ve used a performance analysis tool like YSlow. The trouble with cookies. From a performance perspective, the trouble with cookies is that once the server sets a cookie for a particular domain, all. Of course, cookies are typically very small. In a lot of cases an extra 300 bytes per request ma...
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firstImpression.js: A micro-library for detecting new visitors - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/firstimpression-js-library-detecting-new-visitors
March 31, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. FirstImpression.js: A micro-library for detecting new visitors. Is a micro/nano-library (1 kb minified) that answers the simple question, “Has this user visited this site before? 8221; The detection doesn’t require much logic, so the majority of the code is just a Plain JavaScript. Port of the popular jquery.cookie plugin. Specify cookie name and expiration in days. For a new user, false. For a returning user. Remove custom named cookie. Aaron @ iamcreative.me. Super sweet...
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Should optional link disabling for touch interfaces be a thing? - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/link-disabling-for-touch-interfaces
May 3, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. Should optional link disabling for touch interfaces be a thing? I don’t know if this happens to you but every now and then when I’m reading an article on my iPhone or iPad, I touch the screen to scroll and my finger inadvertently bumps into a link. Woops. Most times it’s not a problem but it can be annoying if I’m on a low-bandwidth connection, reading offline, or viewing a site not optimized for mobile. So here’s a working demo. If you’re reading this on a de...Surely there&...
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Interaction design pattern for brand interaction - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/interaction-design-pattern-for-brand-interaction
June 2, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. Interaction design pattern for brand interaction. Github does this clever thing where if you right-click on their logo, a modal window opens with options to download Github’s brand assets. Pretty slick. It anticipates a common action (right-clicking a logo to download it as an image) and it provides the most logical, most direct path possible for accessing the logo itself: clicking the logo itself. As opposed to using the app. Simple idea for a pattern. I like that this solu...
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Asynchronous Ad Loading With Iframes - Ravelrumba by Rob Flaherty
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/asynchronous-ad-loading-iframes
November 29, 2012 By Rob Flaherty. Asynchronous Ad Loading With Iframes. I’ve written a few posts about working with ad servers (see here. And in both, the discussion in the comments sections steered into questions about ad performance. There are numerous performance issues related to ad loading but the main issue is the blocking effect caused by third-party network requests implemented with. Here’s a demo showing a request with a 3-second delay blocking the page content. Demos featured in this post:.
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