UserPathis in the Customer Success Management Industry

UserPath

userpath

The Basics of Debian GNU/Linux

In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, ransomware has proven to be one of the most notorious and damaging forms of attack. Among the various ransomware variants, RagnarLocker has garnered significant attention for its sophisticated tactics and impact on critical infrastructure sectors. In this blog post, we delve into the world of RagnarLocker ransomware, exploring its indicators of compromise (IOCs), technical intricacies, and the havoc it wreaks on targeted systems. 💥🔓 Ransomware Strikes Israeli Hospital: Ragnar_Locker Takes Responsibility 🏥 In a chilling turn of events, RagnarLocker’s menace struck closer to home as it targeted Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak, Israel a few days ago. The ransomware attack wreaked havoc on the hospital’s administrative computer systems. The aftermath was devastating — medical treatments were disrupted, and the emergency room was compelled to redirect patients to other hospitals for urgent care. Emerging from the chaos, Ragnar_Locker took responsibility for this audacious attack. However, I’ve made a detailed investigation that yielded no signs of any leaked data or information on the group’s Onion site or Telegram group. This marks an unusual departure from the norm, where cybercriminals often flaunt their exploits on such platforms. This incident serves as a grim reminder of the vulnerabilities lurking in critical infrastructure sectors, with healthcare being no exception. It underscores the pressing need for fortified cybersecurity measures to shield essential services from such malicious onslaughts. As the investigation into this unsettling event progresses, the global cybersecurity community will undoubtedly be closely monitoring further developments. 🌐🔒🦠 The Emergence of RagnarLocker 🌄💻 The first traces of RagnarLocker ransomware came to light in April 2020, catching the attention of cybersecurity experts and organizations worldwide. Notably, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued an initial report detailing known IOCs associated with RagnarLocker. Over time, this ransomware variant has evolved, refining its obfuscation techniques and evading traditional detection methods. 🚀🔍 A Persistent Threat 🎯🌐 As of January 2022, the FBI has identified over 52 entities spanning across 10 critical infrastructure sectors affected by RagnarLocker ransomware. These sectors encompass critical manufacturing, energy, financial services, government, and information technology, underscoring the ransomware’s indiscriminate targeting. 💼🏢🔒 Technical Insights 🔍💡 Ransom Note and Identification: RagnarLocker is recognizable by the “.RGNR_<ID>” extension appended to encrypted files. The actors, self-identifying as “RAGNAR_LOCKER,” accompany this extension with a .txt ransom note, containing instructions for payment and data decryption. 💰🔐📄 Advanced Packing Techniques: The ransomware employs advanced techniques like VMProtect, UPX, and custom packing algorithms, adding layers of complexity to its execution. This obfuscation serves to complicate detection efforts. 🧩🔒🔍 Geographical Targeting: RagnarLocker uses the Windows API GetLocaleInfoW to identify the infected machine’s location. If the victim’s location falls within certain geopolitical areas, the ransomware terminates its processes, potentially hinting at the attackers’ geopolitical motivations. 🗺️🌍🔍 Selective Encryption: Instead of opting for a widespread encryption approach, RagnarLocker selectively encrypts files. It designates folders it won’t encrypt, allowing the system to function “normally” while encrypting files with valuable data. This method minimizes disruptions while maximizing the potential payout. 📁🔒🤖 Before encryption, Ragnar Locker spawns the following child processes: This system command deletes all shadow copies on the victim’s system, preventing data recovery by the victim : wmic.exe shadowcopy delete This system command also deletes shadow copies, preventing data recovery by the victim : vssadmin delete shadows /all /quiet This command launches Notepad.exe to show the ransom note to the victim. : notepad.exe [User path]\RGNR_AABBCCDD.txt After the ransom note is created, the actual file encryption process initiates using the __ __algorithm. It excludes files ending in . Salsa20 db, .sys, .dll, lnk, .msi, .drv and .exe. Neutralizing Defenses 🛡️🚫 Service Termination: RagnarLocker goes a step further in its attack strategy by identifying and terminating services commonly used by managed service providers (MSPs) for remote network administration. This further hampers recovery efforts. 💔🔧 Shadow Copy Deletion: Preventing victim recovery efforts, the ransomware erases Volume Shadow Copies, a mechanism used to restore files to previous states. The malware employs various methods, including >vssadmin delete shadows /all /quiet and >wmic.exe.shadowcopy.delete. 🗑️🔮 Conclusion 📢🔐 RagnarLocker ransomware presents a multifaceted threat that combines advanced technical techniques with an intricate attack strategy. Its evolution since its discovery in 2020, along with its targeting of critical infrastructure sectors, underscores the urgency of bolstering cybersecurity measures to defend against this and similar threats. As organizations and security experts continue to dissect RagnarLocker’s mechanisms, it becomes increasingly evident that the fight against ransomware demands a proactive and collaborative approach, where vigilance and innovation go hand in hand. 🛡️🌐🔒 References: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/bnei-brak-hospital-bracing-for-release-of-sensitive-patient-information-after-hack/ https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2022/220307.pdf https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/dailydarkweb/ https://www.pcrisk.com/removal-guides/17018-ragnar-locker-ransomware Also published . here

Uncovering Ragnar_Locker Ransomware: Exploring IOCs

This article is part of my ↗️ where I share resources about building things. Join me :) Note: toolkit newsletters As a , I build things full-time, whether it’s a , or coaching founders to build tech products. For fun, I build , , , , , using my product builder venture newsletter micro-products AI article tool event app meal box app SaaS tracker sneaker app rapid MVP technique. Creating an MVP (minimum viable product) is a great way to test the viability of your startup idea and validate your assumptions before investing significant time and resources in building a full-fledged product. In this post, I'll share my frameworks for . Join my newsletter as I continue to provide valuable like , and . no-code MVP product guide series Validation Product Goals Product/Market Fit Step 1: Map out the users’ problems Don’t start with no-code tools (solution), start with the users (problem). Before you start thinking about no-code tools, figure out who has the problem by creating a user persona, what the users' problems are and how you can build something to meet their needs. You can investigate users’ problems through these methods: Interview potential users to uncover their frustrations Research about customer’s pain points through existing channels (forums, reddit, communities, keyword research) Create a Typeform survey and solicit feedback from a focus group Analyze and document feedback from potential customers Step 2: Map out the users’ journey Once you have a clear understanding of your users' problems, the next step is to map out the users’ journey. A user's journey represents the steps a user takes to achieve a specific goal and jobs to be done while interacting with your product. One easy way to figure out the touch points of your user is to create a customer journey map: There are four components in the user journey map. Let’s create a mapping for building a Ketogenic Recipe app. Example: Users want to find keto recipes using an app Stages: The stages of user path from point A to point B to point C. Hungry > Look up a recipe > Cook a meal User tasks: Actions a user will take at point A, point B and point C. Search for keto-friendly recipes > Browse recipes > Prepare meals Pain points: Problems facing a user at point A, point B and point C. Lack of varieties > Need to eliminate high-carbs foods > Limited recipe options Opportunities: List of possible solutions to solve the pain points at different stages. Answer a simple quiz > Personalized search > Provide recipe recommendations Step 3: Plan your MVP features Make a list of key functionality for your MVP. Brainstorm potential features that are critical to solving users’ pain points (in Step 2) in the most effective way. Example: Key functionality of a keto recipe app User login to the app using Google auth Separate recipes based on different categories Create advanced search and filter for unique dietary needs A list of keto recipes with ingredient lists and cooking instructions Ability to bookmark or save recipes How to keep your MVP lean: It's important to keep in mind that your MVP should be as simple as possible. So that you can launch quickly, test your assumptions and validate your app idea with minimum resources. Here’s my guiding principle: create a minimum set of features only include the essential features that are required to solve the user's problems solve one main problem (help users find keto recipes) and branch out later with wider scope (e.g. meal planner, community suggestions, personalize recipes) Step 4: Map out the technical requirement Based on the required MVP features, make a list of technical requirement that will help you in building the MVP functionality. Example Allow users to create an account, login, and access their saved recipes. User management: To display recipe item listing, upload recipe photo, description, ingredient lists, and tag food categories Database: Allow users to select specific dietary needs and search recipes by keywords Filter and search: This will help you determine what kinds of no-code tools to look for in the next step. Step 5: Evaluate no-code tools No-code tools are a great option for building MVPs because they allow you to create MVP features quickly and cheaply without any coding knowledge. In the previous step, you can see that we're looking for no-code platforms that will allow us to build out the features. user management, database, CMS, and advanced filter Therefore, when researching about no-code tools, you should look for tools that excel in these areas. Criteria for choosing no-code tools There’re other criteria to consider when choosing the right no-code tools. Let’s break it down: Look at all the no-code sample apps. Does the no-code tool allow you to create the functionality you want in your MVP? Are you building a mobile app or web-based app? Is the use case suitable? Can they be seamlessly integrated with other tools to enable you to stitch different components together (payment, automation, online forms, email list) and create a sufficient solution for your users? Does it allow me to integrate with other tools? Consider each tool's limitations. Is it easy to use? What does it do well and what does it not? Do you need to evaluate other alternative tools? How customizable is this tool? If you want to build your MVP further, how flexible is the no-code platform to accommodate the growth and expansion of your MVP? What is the cost involved in adding new features and functionalities as your MVP evolves? Feature expansion. [1] Find me on / 🔥 Twitter LinkedIn [2] Get my product-building teardown — 🚀 Join my newsletter Also Published Here

What App Features to Include in a No-Code MVP (5 Steps to Figure Out!)

Website scraping is much more than extracting content with some CSS selectors. We summarized years of expertise in this guide. With all these new tricks and ideas, you'll be able to scrape data reliably, faster, and more performant. And get some extra fields that you thought were not present. Prerequisites For the code to work, you will need . Some systems have it pre-installed. After that, install all the necessary libraries by running pip install. python3 installed pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas Getting the HTML from a URL is easy with the requests library. Then pass the content to BeautifulSoup, and we can start getting data and querying with selectors. We won't go into much detail. In short, you can use to get page elements and content. Some require a different syntax, but we'll discover that later. CSS selectors import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup response = requests.get("https://zenrows.com") soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser') print(soup.title.string) # Web Data Automation Made Easy - ZenRows To avoid requesting the HTML every time, we can store it in an HTML file and load BeautifulSoup from there. For a simple demo, we can do this manually. An easy way to do that is to view the page source, copy and paste it into a file. It is essential to visit the page without being logged in, as a crawler would do. Getting the HTML in here might look like a simple task, but nothing farther from the truth. We won't cover it in this blog post, but it deserves a complete guide. Our advice is to use this static approach since many websites will redirect you to a login page after a few requests. Some others will show a captcha, and in the worst-case scenario, your IP will get banned. with open("test.html") as fp: soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, "html.parser") print(soup.title.string) # Web Data Automation Made Easy - ZenRows Once we load statically from a file, we can test as many times as possible without any networking or blocking problem. Explore before Coding Before we start coding, we have to understand the page's content and structure. For that, the easier way we know is to inspect the target page using a browser. . We will be using Chrome's DevTools, but other browsers have similar tools We can open any product page on Amazon, for example, and a quick look will show us the product's name, price, availability, and many other fields. Before copying all those selectors, we recommend taking a couple of minutes to look for hidden inputs, metadata, and network requests. Beware of doing this with Chrome DevTools or similar means. You will see the content once the Javascript and network requests have (maybe) modified it. It is tiresome, but sometimes we must explore the original HTML to avoid running Javascript. We won't need to run a headless browser - i.e., Puppeteer - if we find everything, saving time and memory consumption. Disclaimer: we won't include the URL request in the code snippets for every example. They all look like the first one. And remember, store an HTML file locally if you are going to test it several times. Hidden Inputs Hidden inputs allow developers to include input fields that end-users cannot see nor modify. Many forms use these to include internal IDs or security tokens. In , we can see that there are many more. Some will be available in other places or formats, but sometimes they are unique. Either way, hidden inputs' names tend to be more stable than classes. Amazon products Metadata While some content is visible via UI, it might be easier to extract using metadata. You can get view count in numeric format and publish date in YYYY-mm-dd format in a . Those two can be obtained with means from the visible part, but there is no need. Spending a few minutes doing these techniques pays off. YouTube video interactionCount = soup.find('meta', itemprop="interactionCount") print(interactionCount['content']) # 8566042 datePublished = soup.find('meta', itemprop="datePublished") print(datePublished['content']) # 2014-01-09 XHR Requests Some other websites decide to load an empty template and bring all the data via XHR requests. In those cases, checking just the original HTML won't be enough. We need to inspect the networking, specifically the XHR requests. That's the case for . Fill the form with any city and search. That will redirect you to a results page with a skeleton page while it performs some queries for the city you entered. Auction That forces us to use a headless browser that can execute Javascript and intercept network requests, but we'll see its upsides also. Sometimes you can call the XHR endpoint directly, but they usually require cookies or other authentication methods. Or they can instantly ban you since that is not a regular user path. Be careful. We struck gold. Take another look at the image. All the data you can have, already clean and formatted, is ready to be extracted. And then some more. Geolocation, internal IDs, numerical price with no format, year built etcetera. Recipes and Tricks to Extract Reliable Content Set aside your urges for a second. Getting everything with CSS selectors is an option, but there are many more. Take a look at all these, and then think again before using selectors directly. We are not saying those are bad and ours great. Don't get us wrong. We are trying to give you more tools and ideas. Then it will be your decision every time. Getting Internal Links Now, we will start using BeautifulSoup to get meaningful content. This library allows us to get content by IDs, classes, pseudo-selectors, and many more. We will only cover a small subset of its capabilities. This example will extract all the internal links from the page. For simplicity's sake, only links starting with a slash will be considered internal. In a completer case, we should check domain and subdomains. internalLinks = [ a.get('href') for a in soup.find_all('a') if a.get('href') and a.get('href').startswith('/')] print(internalLinks) Once we have all those links, we could deduplicate and queue them for future scraping. By doing it, we would be building a whole website crawler, not just for one page. Since that is an entirely different problem, we wanted to mention it and prepare a blog post to handle its usage and scalability. The number of pages to crawl can snowball. Just a note of caution: be prudent while running this automatically. You can get hundreds of links in a few seconds, which would result in too many requests to the same site. If not handled carefully, captchas or bans will probably apply. Extracting Social Links and Emails Another common scraping task is to extract social links and emails. There is no exact definition for "social links," so we'll obtain them based on domain. As for emails, there are two options: "mailto" links and checking the whole text. We will be using a for this demo. scraping test site This first snippet will get all the links, similar to the previous one. Then loop over all of them, checking if any social domains or "mailto" are present. In that case, add that URL to the list and finally print it. links = [a.get('href') for a in soup.find_all('a')] to_extract = ["facebook.com", "twitter.com", "mailto:"] social_links = [] for link in links: for social in to_extract: if link and social in link: social_links.append(link) print(social_links) #['mailto:****@webscraper.io', #'https://www.facebook.com/webscraperio/', #'https://twitter.com/webscraperio'] This second one is a bit more tricky if you are not familiar with regular expressions. In short, they will try to match any text given a search pattern. In this case, it will try to match some characters (mainly letters and numbers), followed by [@], then again chars - the domain - [dot] and finally two to four characters - Internet top-level domains or TLD. It will find, for example, . test@example.com Note that this regex is not a complete one because it won't match composed TLDs such as . co.uk We can run this expression in the entire content (HTML) or just the text. We use the HTML for completion, although we will duplicate the email since it's shown in the text and an href. emails = re.findall(   r"[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+.[A-Za-z]{2,4}",   str(soup)) print(emails) # ['@webscraper.io', '@webscraper.io'] Parse Tables Automatically HTML tables have been around forever, but they are still in use for displaying tabular content. We can take advantage of that since they are usually structured and well-formatted. Using as an example, we will extract all the values to an array and a pandas dataframe. It is a simple example, but you should manipulate all the data as if it came from a dataset. Wikipedia's List of best-selling albums We start by finding a table and looping through all the rows ("tr"). For each of them, find cells ("td" or "th"). The following lines will remove notes and collapsible content from Wikipedia tables, not strictly necessary. Then, append the cell's stripped text to the row and the row to the final output. Print the result to check that everything looks fine. table = soup.find("table", class_="sortable") output = [] for row in table.findAll("tr"): new_row = [] for cell in row.findAll(["td", "th"]): for sup in cell.findAll('sup'): sup.extract() for collapsible in cell.findAll( class_="mw-collapsible-content"): collapsible.extract() new_row.append(cell.get_text().strip()) output.append(new_row) print(output) #[ #['Artist', 'Album', 'Released', ...], #['Michael Jackson', 'Thriller', '1982', ...] #] Another way is to use and import directly the HTML, as shown below. It will handle everything for us: the first line will match the headers, and the rest will be inserted as content with the right type. returns an array, so we take the first item and then remove a column that has no content. pandas read_html Once into a dataframe, we could do any operation, like ordering by sales, since pandas converted some columns to numbers. Or sum all the claim sales. Not truly useful here, but you get the idea. import pandas as pd table_df = pd.read_html(str(table))[0] table_df = table_df.drop('Ref(s)', 1) print(table_df.columns) # ['Artist', 'Album', 'Released' ... print(table_df.dtypes) # ... Released int64 ... print(table_df['Claimed sales*'].sum()) # 422 print(table_df.loc[3]) #Artist			Pink Floyd #Album				The Dark Side of the Moon #Released			1973 #Genre				Progressive rock #Total certified copies...	24.4 #Claimed sales*		45 Extract from Metadata instead of HTML As seen before, there are ways to get essential data without relying on visual content. Let's see an example using . We'll try to get the actors.Easy, right? A one-liner will do. Netflix's The Witcher actors = soup.find(class_="item-starring").find( class_="title-data-info-item-list") print(actors.text.split(',')) #['Henry Cavill', 'Anya Chalotra', 'Freya Allan'] What if I told you that there are fourteen actors and actresses? Will you try to get 'em all? Do not scroll further if you want to try it by yourself. I'll wait. Nothing yet? Remember, there's more than meets the eye. You know three of them; search for those in the original HTML. To be honest, there's another place down below that shows the whole cast, but try to avoid it. Netflix includes a Schema.org snippet with the actor and actress list and many other data. As with the YouTube example, sometimes it is more convenient to use this approach. Dates, for example, are usually displayed in "machine-like" format, which is more helpful while scraping. import json ldJson = soup.find("script", type="application/ld+json") parsedJson = json.loads(ldJson.contents[0]) print([actor['name'] for actor in parsedJson['actors']]) #[... 'Jodhi May', 'MyAnna Buring', 'Joey Batey' ...] Some other times this is a practical approach if we don't want to render Javascript. We'll show an example using . They are known blockers. After visiting a few pages, you will be redirected to a login page. Be careful while scraping Instagram and use local HTML for testing. Instagram Billie Eilish's profile We'll cover how to avoid those blocks or redirects in a future post. Stay tuned! The usual way would be to search for a class, in our case "Y8-fY". We advise against using these classes since they will probably change. They look autogenerated. Many modern websites use this kind of CSS, and it gets generated for every change, which means that we cannot rely on them. Plan B: , right? It will work. But we need Javascript rendering for that since it is not present on the first load. As stated before, we should try to avoid that. "header ul > li" Take a look at the source HTML: title and description include followers, following, and post numbers. It might be a problem since they are in string format, but we can get over it. If we only want that data, we won't need a headless browser. Great! metaDescription = soup.find("meta", {'name': 'description'}) print(metaDescription['content']) #87.9m Followers, 0 Following, 493 Posts ... Hidden eCommerce Product Information Combining some of the techniques already seen, we aim to extract product information that is not visible. Our first example is a Shopify eCommerce, . Spigen Take a look on your own first if you want. Hint: look for the brand 🤐. We'll be able to extract it reliably, not from the product name nor the breadcrumbs, since we cannot say if they are always related. Did you find them? In this case, they use "itemprop" and include Product and Offer from . We could probably tell if a product is in stock by looking at the form or the "Add to cart" button. But there is no need, we can trust on . As for the brand, the same snippet as the one used for YouTube but changing the property name to "brand." schema.org itemprop="availability" brand = soup.find('meta', itemprop="brand") print(brand['content']) # Tesla Another Shopify example: . We want to extract the rating count and average, accessible in the HTML but somewhat hidden. The average rating is hidden from view using CSS. nomz There's a screen reader only tag with the average and the count near it. Those two include text, not a big deal. But we know we can do better. It is an easy one if you inspect the source. The Product schema will be the first thing you see. Applying the same knowledge from the Netflix example, get the first "ld+json" block, parse the JSON, and all the content will be available! import json ldJson = soup.find("script", type="application/ld+json") parsedJson = json.loads(ldJson.contents[0]) print(parsedJson["aggregateRating"]["ratingValue"]) # 4.9 print(parsedJson["aggregateRating"]["reviewCount"]) # 57 print(parsedJson["weight"]) # 0.492kg -> extra, not visible in UI Last but not least, we will take advantage of data attributes, which are also common in eCommerce. While inspecting , we can see that every product has several data points that will come in handy. Price in numeric format, ID, product name, and category. We have there all the data we might need. Marucci Sports Wood Bats products = [] cards = soup.find_all(class_="card") for card in cards:   products.append({     'id': card.get('data-entity-id'),     'name': card.get('data-name'),     'category': card.get('data-product-category'),     'price': card.get('data-product-price')   }) print(products) # [ #   { #     "category": "Wood Bats, Wood Bats/Professional Cuts", #     "id": "1945", #     "name": "6 Bat USA Professional Cut Bundle", #     "price": "579.99" #   }, #   { #     "category": "Wood Bats, Wood Bats/Pro Model", #     "id": "1804", #     "name": "M-71 Pro Model", #     "price": "159.99" #   }, #   ... # ] Remaining Obstacles All right! You got all the data from that page. Now you have to replicate it to a second and then a third. Scale is important. And so is not getting banned. But you also have to convert this data and store it: CSV files or databases, whatever you need. Nested fields are not easy to export to any of those formats. We already took enough of your time. Take in all this new information, use it in your everyday work. Meanwhile, we'll be working on the following guides to overcoming all these obstacles! Conclusion We'd like you to go with three lessons: CSS selectors are good, but there are other options. Some content is hidden - or not present - but accessible via metadata. Try to avoid loading Javascript and headless browsers to boost performance. Each of these has upsides and downsides, different approaches, and many, many alternatives. Writing a complete guide would be, well, a long book, not a blog post. if you know any more website scraping tricks or have doubts about applying them. Contact us Remember, we covered scraping, but there is much more: crawling, avoiding being blocked, converting and storing the content, scaling the infrastructure, and more. Stay tuned! And if you liked the content, please share it! Also published on: https://www.zenrows.com/blog/mastering-web-scraping-in-python-from-zero-to-hero

How to Master Web Scraping in Python: From Zero to Hero

The last few years have been a very riveting time. We witness a global integration of different spheres. One of the most prominent examples is AI. This technology is already being applied in medicine, education, design and of course, marketing. Why is this happening? Mainly because the new reality demands new ideas from businesses. As a result, marketers are forced to actively seek insights and unconventional solutions to better understand their customers/users and interact with them more effectively and faster than competitors. Over the past few years, the business has shifted its focus to digitalization, and 2020 has been a tremendous trigger to accelerate the process. Now the companies' attention is focused on creating their own IT products. And customer are at an all-time high. expectations This has led to companies being in a constant, tight race for user loyalty and love. Those who can offer the best user experience lead the race. It is a big challenge for marketers as well — they need to dig deeper into the product, user path, preferences, and market changes. And to do that, they need insights to percept business from different angles and push the boundaries of ideas. One way to find such an idea is to look at the business through the eyes of someone from another profession, such as a tester. Who better to understand the user than him, testing different variations of behavior over and over again? A marketer and a tester? At first sight, you can think that they have absolutely different areas of responsibility that do not overlap. Really, what good can testers do in marketing if they are not immersed in the business and marketing processes? However, in recent years, testing has become deeply integrated into business. What has changed? First, I purposely put the emphasis on QA in the title of the article. Testers and QA are already inseparable concepts. These experts monitor the quality of the product from all sides (functional, logical, and usability), immersing themselves in the business processes and business logic of the product. Secondly, they try on the masks of your product's TA ( ). Therefore, they have a good understanding of what will appeal to the user and make good business sense. think of the character method at least A tester can be a marketer's right hand, as the key to success in business promotion is understanding your target audience. As you can see, marketers and testers do have something in common. At a minimum, interest in keeping the user happy with the product so that loyalty grows. At a maximum, an understanding of what it takes to do it. If they have a common goal, then they can help each other to achieve it. I will show you that such an unusual integration hides a lot of insights and benefits for business and I give you some examples from my testing and QA agency. So, what can testers do for marketers? And how does this unusual alliance help business? Improve the user experience The user experience is one of the main things that affects product loyalty and sales. According to a report, one in three customers abandons a brand after just one bad experience, and 92% leave completely after two or three negative interactions. To improve the interaction with the product (website or app) and increase conversions, you need to understand if there is a problem with functionality or usability. And also analyze why users leave, do not take the targeted action, and what exactly they do not like. PwC Of course, there are many different useful tools that marketers can use on their own. For example, the simplest and most accessible is Google analytics. But there is a crucial point. Just like in the development phase, in product analytics you need the perspective not of someone who is immersed in the specifics of the product, but of someone who will be using it. What can a tester tell you: How the user interacts with the product; Whether the user is comfortable, whether he is satisfied with everything in functionality or usability; Whether problems arise at any stage of interaction with the product; What prevents the user from taking the targeted action (in terms of functionality and usability). The tester has a great background, fully immerses himself in the user experience, asks a lot of questions, and endlessly tests possible variations in user behavior. This is why the tester understands the user's logic well. Case study: Superfluous forms and elements are frequent enemies of conversions. The more actions you force the user to take, the lower the chance of him reaching the end. We had a case: a client had a low conversion rate at the stage of purchasing in the online store. A portion of users left the page when they were about to make a purchase. When we started testing, we realized that the problem was with unnecessary fields. For example, the «patronymic» field was mandatory. We made all not really important fields voluntary ones. After the release, they conversion was up. So, we continued the experiment and removed all unnecessary fields to fill in and merged some fields into one. Build processes and make them more efficient I think everyone who has worked with product teams understands the importance of a well-functioning team and inter-team communication processes. And really, it is not just a story about IT teams. Weak processes affect the entire chain - from the moment an idea is conceived to its implementation and launch. And in the end, this is reflected in the quality of the product and user loyalty. Statistically, 72% of clients will share a positive experience with 6 or more people. If customers are dissatisfied, 13% of them will share their with 15 or more people. The processes are handled by a specially trained QA rather than a tester. experience They can put processes not only between teams but for example between IT and marketing and even between accounting departments. These professionals look at a company like clockwork and see where the failure has occurred. What you can learn from QA: If weak processes affect product quality and user loyalty; What points in the work processes need to be addressed and what changes need to be made to improve the end result; How to communicate with other departments so that you do not miss important details and improve your product performance. Case study: Basically, processes are how tasks are distributed and how information is communicated; how departments and teams interact, etc. Our client had a high percentage of customer service calls. For several months, our QA has been putting teamwork processes in place and selecting flexible methods of interaction between employees. The result was stunning — after only two months the number of complaints had already decreased by 4 times. Conduct a competitive analysis Analytics are the eyes and ears of the marketer. Without it, it is impossible to create a plan of promotion and brand positioning in the market. And of course, competitive analysis is important in analytics. It is necessary to study not only what competitors are doing, but also why users like their products, or vice versa — why they abandon it. Again, you may ask the tester about it. What you can find out from the tester; How users interact with a competitor's product; What the user path is; Does your competitor have cool features that your product does not; What can be improved to outperform a competitor's product. Case study: We often get requests «we need competitive analysis of websites or applications». We look at the functionality of all the sites, map the differences and thus find features or bugs in the competitors. For example, our client, a marketplace, analyzed competitors' products and created the same functionality. And asked us to do an analysis and see if they took everything into account. When we started checking, we saw that there was an inconspicuous section on a competitor's site that hid a useful feature with the ability to print orders and receipts. This allowed our client, firstly, to implement this feature in its functionality. Secondly, do not repeat the competitor’s and do not hide it in inconspicuous sections. I hope that I was able to show you real examples of how a seemingly strange union of two different professions can become an effective tool for business. It is important not to be afraid to look for insights where there previously seemed to be none. And at the same time constantly communicate with colleagues from different fields, exchanging experiences and observations. After all, this is where the great potential for business development and growth lies.

QA + Marketing: Can Testers Help Marketers and Vice Versa?

Continuing my personal journey into learning more about , I wanted to create a graph visualization of data stored in a graph database.  Graph visualization (or link analysis) presents data as a network of entities that are classified as nodes and links. To illustrate, consider this very simple network diagram: Dgraph Slash GraphQL While not a perfect example, one can understand the relationships between various services (nodes) and their inner-connectivity (links). This means the X service relies on the Y service to meet the needs of the business. However, what most may not realize is the additional dependency of the Z service, which is easily recognized by this illustration. For this article, I wanted to build a solution that can dynamically create a graph visualization. Taking this approach, I will be able to simply alter the input source to retrieve an entirely different set of graph data to process and analyze. The Approach Instead of mocking up data in a Spring Boot application (as noted in the " " article), I set a goal to utilize actual data for this article. Tracking the Worst Sci-Fi Movies With Angular and Slash GraphQL From my research, I concluded that the key to a building graph visualization is to have a data set that contains various relationships. Relationships that are not predictable and driven by uncontrolled sources. The first data source that came to mind was Twitter. After retrieving data using the Twitter API, the JSON-based data would be loaded into a Dgraph Slash GraphQL database using a somewhat simple Python program and a schema that represents the tweets and users captured by and uploaded into Slash GraphQL. Using the and the graph visualization library, the resulting data will be graphed to visually represent the nodes and links related to the #NeilPeart hashtag. The illustration below summarizes my approach: twarc Angular CLI ngx-graph Retrieving Data From Twitter Using `twarc` While I have maintained a semi-active Twitter account ( ) for almost nine years, I visited the to create a project called "Dgraph" and an application called "DgraphIntegration". This step was necessary in order to make API calls against the Twitter service. @johnjvester Twitter Developer Portal The solution (by DocNow) allows for Twitter data to be retrieved from the Twitter API and returned in an easy-to-use, line-oriented, JSON format. The twarc command line tool was written and designed to work with the Python programming language and is easily configured using the command and supplying the following credential values from the "DgraphIntegration" application: twarc twarc configure CONSUMER_KEY CONSUMER_SECRET ACCESS_TOKEN ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET With the death of percussionist/lyricist , I performed a search for hashtags that continue to reference this wonderfully-departed soul. The following search command was utilized with twarc: Neil Peart twarc search #NeilPeart > tweets.jsonl Below is one example of the thousands of search results that were retrieved via the twarc search: { : , : , : { : , : }
} "content" "It’s been one year since he passed, but the music lives on... he also probably wouldn’t have liked what was going on in the word. Keep resting easy, Neil #NeilPeart https://t.co/pTidwTYsxG" "tweet_id" "1347203390560940035" "user" "screen_name" "Austin Miller" "handle" "AMiller1397" Preparing Dgraph Slash GraphQL Starting in September 2020, Dgraph has offered a fully managed backend service, called Slash GraphQL. Along with a hosted graph database instance, there is also a RESTful interface. This functionality, combined with 10,000 free credits for API use, provides the perfect target data store for the #NeilPeart data that I wish to graph. The first step was to create a new backend instance, which I called : tweet-graph Next, I created a simple schema for the data I wanted to graph: type User { : ! @id @search(by: [hash])
  screen_name: ! @search(by: [fulltext])
}

type Tweet { : ! @id @search(by: [hash])
  content: !
  user: User
}

type Configuration { : ID
  search_string: !
} handle String String tweet_id String String id String The and types house all of the data displayed in the JSON example above. The type will be used by the Angular client to display the search string utilized for the graph data. User Tweet Configuration Loading Data into Slash GraphQL Using Python Two Python programs will be utilized to process the JSON data extracted from Twitter using twarc: convert - processes the JSON data to identify any Twitter mentions to another user upload - prepares and performs the upload of JSON data into Slash GraphQL The core logic for this example lives in the upload program, which executes the following base code: data = {}
users = {}

gather_tweets_by_user()

search_string = os.getenv( )
print(search_string)

upload_to_slash(create_configuration_query(search_string)) handle data:
    print( )
    upload_to_slash(create_add_tweets_query(users[handle], data[handle])) 'TWARC_SEARCH_STRING' for in "=====" The organizes the Twitter data into the and objects. gather_tweets_by_user() data users The stores the search that was performed into Slash GraphQL for use by the Angular client upload_to_slash(create_configuration_query(search_string)) The loop processes the and objects, uploading each record into Slash GraphQL using for data user upload_to_slash(create_add_tweets_query(users[handle], data[handle])) Once the program finishes, you can execute the following query from the API Explorer in Slash GraphQL: query MyQuery {
  queryTweet {
    content
    tweet_id
    user {
      screen_name
      handle
    }
  }
}

query MyQuery {
  queryConfiguration {
    search_string
  }
} Using `ngx-graph` With Angular CLI The Angular CLI was used to create a simple Angular application. In fact, the base component will be expanded for use by , which was installed using the following command: ngx-graph npm install @swimlane/ngx-graph --save Here is the working AppModule for the application: @NgModule({ : [
    AppComponent
  ], : [
    BrowserModule,
    BrowserAnimationsModule,
    AppRoutingModule,
    HttpClientModule,
    NgxGraphModule,
    NgxChartsModule,
    NgxSpinnerModule
  ], : [CUSTOM_ELEMENTS_SCHEMA], : [], : [AppComponent]
}) { } declarations imports schemas providers bootstrap export class AppModule In order to access data from Slash GraphQL, the following method was added to the GraphQlService in Angular: allTweets:string = + + + + + + + + + ;

getTweetData() { .http.get<QueryResult>( .baseUrl + + .allTweets).pipe(
    tap(),
    catchError( { ErrorUtils.errorHandler(err)
    }));
} 'query MyQuery {' '  queryTweet {' '    content' '    tweet_id' '    user {' '      screen_name' '      handle' '    }' '  }' '}' return this this '?query=' this => err return Preparing Slash GraphQL to Work With `ngx-graph` The data in Slash GraphQL must be modified in order to work with the framework. As a result, a ConversionService was added to the Angular client, which performed the following tasks: ngx-graph createGraphPayload(queryResult: QueryResult): GraphPayload { graphPayload: GraphPayload = GraphPayload(); (queryResult) { (queryResult.data && queryResult.data.queryTweet) { tweetList: QueryTweet[] = queryResult.data.queryTweet;

      tweetList.forEach( { tweetNode:GraphNode = .getTweetNode(queryTweet, graphPayload); userNode:GraphNode = .getUserNode(queryTweet, graphPayload); (tweetNode && userNode) { graphEdge:GraphEdge = GraphEdge();
          graphEdge.id = ConversionService.createRandomId(); (tweetNode.label.substring( , ) === ) {
            graphEdge.label = ;
          } {
            graphEdge.label = ;
          }

          graphEdge.source = userNode.id;
          graphEdge.target = tweetNode.id;
          graphPayload.links.push(graphEdge);
        }
      });
    }
  } .log( , graphPayload); graphPayload;
} let new if if let ( ) => queryTweet let this let this if let new if 0 2 'RT' 'retweet' else 'tweet' console 'graphPayload' return The resulting structure contains the following object hierarchy: {
  links: GraphEdge[] = [];
  nodes: GraphNode[] = [];
} {
  id: string;
  label: string;
  source: string;
  target: string;
} {
  id: string;
  label: string;
  twitter_uri: string;
} export class GraphPayload export class GraphEdge implements Edge export class GraphNode implements Node While this work could have been completed as part of the load into Slash GraphQL, I wanted to keep the original source data in a format that could be used by other processes and not be proprietary to . ngx-graph Configuring the Angular View When the Angular client starts, the following method will fire, which will show a spinner while the data is processing. Then, it will display the graphical representation of the data once Slash GraphQL has provided the data and the ConversionService has finished processing the data: OnInit ngOnInit() { .spinner.show(); .graphQlService.getConfigurationData().subscribe( { (configs) { .filterValue = configs.data.queryConfiguration[ ].search_string; .graphQlService.getTweetData().subscribe( { (data) { queryResult: QueryResult = data; .graphPayload = .conversionService.createGraphPayload(queryResult); .fitGraph(); .showData = ;
        }
      }, (error) => { .error( , error);
      }).add( { .spinner.hide();
      });
    }
  }, (error) => { .error( , error);
  }).add( { .spinner.hide();
  });
} this this => configs if this 0 this => data if let this this this this true console 'error' => () this console 'error' => () this On the template side, the following tags were employed: ngx <ngx-graph *ngIf= = layout= [view]= [showMiniMap]= [zoomToFit$]= [links]= [nodes]= > <svg:marker id="arrow" viewBox="0 -5 10 10" refX="8" refY="0" markerWidth="4" markerHeight="4" orient="auto">
      <svg:path d="M0,-5L10,0L0,5" class="arrow-head" />
    </svg:marker>
  </ng-template>

  <ng-template #nodeTemplate let-node>
    <svg:g class="node" (click)="clickNode(node)">
      <svg:rect
        [attr.width]="node.dimension.width"
        [attr.height]="node.dimension.height"
        [attr.fill]="node.data.color"
      />
      <svg:text alignment-baseline="central" [attr.x]="10" [attr.y]="node.dimension.height / 2">
        {{node.label}}
      </svg:text>
    </svg:g>
  </ng-template>

  <ng-template #linkTemplate let-link>
    <svg:g class="edge">
      <svg:path class="line" stroke-width="2" marker-end="url(#arrow)"></svg:path>
      <svg:text class="edge-label" text-anchor="middle">
        <textPath
          class="text-path"
          [attr.href]="'#' + link.id"
          [style.dominant-baseline]="link.dominantBaseline"
          startOffset="50%"
        >
          {{link.label}}
        </textPath>
      </svg:text>
    </svg:g>
  </ng-template>

</ngx-graph> "showData" class "chart-container" "dagre" "[1720, 768]" "false" "zoomToFit$" "graphPayload.links" "graphPayload.nodes" < # > ng-template defsTemplate The tags not only provide a richer presentation of the data but also introduce the ability to click on a given node and see the original tweet in a new browser window. ng-template Running the Angular Client With the Angular client running, you can retrieve the data from the Slash GraphQL by navigating to the application. You will then see a  user experience similar to below: It is possible to zoom into this view and even rearrange the nodes to better comprehend the result set. Please note: For those who are not fond of the "dagre" layout, you can adjust the property to another in . ngx-graph.layout graph layout option ngx-graph When the end-user clicks a given node, the original message in Twitter displays in a new browser window: Conclusion A fully-functional Twitter Graph was created using the following frameworks and services: Twitter API and Developer Application twarc and custom Python code Dgraph Slash GraphQL Angular CLI and ngx-graph In a matter of steps, you can analyze Twitter search results graphically, which will likely expose links and nodes that are not apparent through any other data analysis efforts. This is similar to the network example in the introduction of this article that exposed a dependency on the Z service. If you are interested in the full source code for the Angular application, including the Python import programs referenced above, please visit the following repository on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/johnjvester/tweet-graph-client Have a really great day! Also published at https://dzone.com/articles/creating-a-twitter-graph-using-slash-graphql

How To Make a Twitter Graph with Slash GraphQL

For starters, let’s define our concepts. What is a lead? A lead is a user who is interested in your product: they have signed up on your website and subscribed to your emails. What is the difference between leads and other users? Leads have already shown interest in your product and shared their contact information with you. What is lead generation? is a process of turning your users into leads. Lead generation This is how a user’s path looks like: first, they visit your website, blog or social network page and get acquainted with your product. At this stage, they only get you to know, so most likely they are not ready to buy from you yet. Say, they like your product and decide to share with you their contact. You have a lead now! Yay! Actually, there’s not much to celebrate yet, as What to do next? 50% of leads are not ready to buy from you right now, even more so, they are not ready to buy from you later as well. Next comes a hard and treacherous path of nurturing your leads. What is lead nurturing? is a process of preparing and stimulating potential users to purchase. Lead nurturing How to help your lead make a purchase? How not to miss opportunities to do so? There are several ways to complete these tasks, but let’s not move far away from  the topic at hand (which is email campaigns). What are the pros of email marketing? With a user’s email address, you get an opportunity to start personally communicating with this user and building a long-term relationship with them. With the right timing and message for your user segment, your nurture campaign will be even more effective. Sounds enticing, but it gets harder the moment you get closer to the actual implementation. What kind of emails do you need to send to your users? What kind of emails will they be interested in? You can choose subjects and settings for your nurture campaigns based on the chosen segment and other attributes. We are on a mission to help you. So here are the keystone kinds of nurture campaigns for every step of the marketing funnel. Just in case you run out of inspiration Types of nurture campaigns The goal of every email campaign listed below is in stimulating users to make a purchase. Some campaigns will encourage users to buy something and other campaigns will build trusting relationships between you and your users. The end result is basically the same in every case, however. Discount Discounts will help you motivate your users to make a purchase. The goals of your discount campaign may vary based on the user segment you’ve chosen for it. If it’s a potential customer, a discount you offer them may be a friendly reminder to purchase. If you’re giving a discount to your active customers, this offer may be used to strengthen their brand loyalty. Promotion campaign Promotion campaign is a direct call to buy, signup or subscribe. An effective email campaign will help you increase sales. This kind of campaigns will work with both your potential customers and the active ones. For a promotion campaign to give you a sales boost, it should have a nice design and be aimed at the right audience, segmented by location, age, gender etc. Reminder Reminder emails will warn customers who have forgotten about their trial period, subscription or discount coming to an end. The goal of an email like this is to get your customers back to the purchase before you lose them completely. An example of such email in Dashly Left the website at the payment stage Sometimes users change their mind and don’t finish their purchase or don’t fill a leadform on your website. Probably, they misunderstood something and need some help? Emails of this kind are sent automatically and may boost your conversion on the same traffic. This is what Statista sends to users who left the website: Feedback Such emails will gather feedback from your customers, and the feedback will help you increase the quality of your product and services. Besides, asking customers what they think about your product or service may help you increase their brand loyalty. Feedback emails are usually the triggered ones, these are sent right after completing a payment or some time after subscribing to your platform. The feedback you’ve gathered can be used in other nurture emails to increase brand loyalty. Updates Update emails are aimed at your active customers. The goal of such emails is to notify users about changes in your product. These also nurture both cold and warm leads because you’re telling them that your product is constantly improved. That’s how an Instagram planning app notified about its Instagram Stories update: Content Content campaigns are not about selling right here and right now, their goal is to build trusting relationships with users by sharing useful information like articles, videos and guides. Unlike promotion campaigns, content campaigns contain no direct call to purchase. With emails of this kind, companies demonstrate their expertise and implicitly push a sales boost. Announcement Announcement campaigns are basically any emails notifying about upcoming events, new projects, schedule changes, etc. Email campaigns of this kind are aimed at active users interested in such notifications. For example, we use these to remind our users about webinars and encourage them to visit our website again – probably, there’s something new? This way Miro tells about the full agenda release: Welcome email Welcome email are sent to users after completing their signup. Subscribers open welcome emails more often than users of other segments. The goal of welcome  emails is to give users the best possible presentation of your company. At the same time, it’s important not to overload users with information in a welcome email. Define the subject of that campaign based on your marketing goals, and don’t forget to make it nice and discreet enough too! Greeting Greeting emails will help you increase your users’ loyalty and reactivate them. There are two types of occasions to send a greeting email: greeting a user on their birthday and greeting them on any other significant date such as a commonly celebrated holiday or even “You’ve been with us for more than 30 days!”. To send birthday greeting emails, your customer base must contain not only email addresses of your customers, but their birthday dates as well. The task does get harder because of this, but the CTR of this greeting email will be much higher than that of an impersonal Christmas greeting email. Reactivation Reactivation emails are aimed at users who have forgotten about you. Emails of this kind reactivate users who don’t buy anything from you. These emails may contain a discount or a free service license. The goal of a reactivation email campaign is to get your customer to purchase from you again and to find out why they had left you in the first place. That’s how Coursera (an online learning platform) is trying to get me to learn with them again: Of course, the potential of email campaigns is not limited by this list alone. We’ve listed the kinds of campaigns that we think will be of the most value to you! Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what email campaigns to launch. Just make sure they meet your marketing goals. Pay attention to the right segmentation as well. Don’t just stop at choosing what kind of a campaign to make. Without the right segmentation, you might end up sending your emails to the wrong audience. Without automation, your marketing specialist might waste a ton of time sending the emails. That’s why we decided to tell you about how to make it easier for your marketing team, while also increasing the quality of your campaign and helping you make sure your emails hit the right segment. The following guide will help you increase your sales and LTV metrics. How to make your email campaigns better Qualify Qualification builds your target audience. It also lets you rank them by their interests. With that information, you’ll be able to segment your customers easily, without a risk of wasting time and resources on those who are out of your target audience. Qualification is usually done via pop-up windows or sales calls. The questions usually depend on your product and your target audience. Dashly has ready-made qualification pop-ups like. They enable us to segment audience and send relevant messages to particular groups of people. Segment Segmentation lets you divide your leads and users into groups of matching features (such as gender, age, geography etc.) so that you can offer more personal and profitable deals to your customers. By segmenting, you can get as close to your customers as possible, sending them the content they will be 100% happy to see. You can use marketing automation, pop-ups and email campaigns to segment your customers. Try segmenting outside of the standard segments. Your product defines certain customer groups that may be of a strategic value to you. Automate Automated email campaign is set according to certain parameters (like time, date, event, segment etc.) that automatically fire after getting triggered. Automation makes emailing job much easier. What you can do by automating: Plan email campaigns; Send emails to special customer segments; Send triggered emails; Create email sequences. How do you automate? Using email marketing platforms, of course. With marketing automation, you can also track your visitors’ behaviour. You can see who reads your email and who clicks a link in it. Personalize Personalization is a must of all email campaigns nowadays. It lets you drastically improve your email open rate too. Another advantage of personalization is that it won’t take you too long to get it work. With automation and segmentation, you can set your personalized email campaigns that will be sent to specific user segments at a particular moment. Other than that, you’ll only need to make your emails look nice and make sure they deliver the good content. Personalized notification from Hackernoon: There you have it, a long list of nurture email campaigns for practically all occasions. Just remember that there’s no point in using every single one of them at the same time. Try starting a couple of basic campaigns, perfecting their quality. Choose what user segments to send emails to, automate and personalize them, and don’t forget to work on their design too.

12 Ways You Can Use Email to Nurture Leads to Conversion

An autofunnel is the user’s path from getting acquainted with making a purchase where you accompany him or her with pre-configured trigger messages. The important advantage lies precisely in the “auto” thing: you configure the funnel once and forever (for a long time). The implementation of the autofunnel requires virtually no human involvement. You can do this using Dashly.io Usually, the path of the customer is as follows: a visitor — a cold lead — a hot lead — a customer — a repeat customer. An autofunnel saves your resources while increasing the number of customers. That is, with its help you “handle” more potential customers without spending time on staff and additional budget. What does an autofunnel consist of? An autofunnel consists of several sequential stages; at each stage, you make an offer to the user which leads him or her to the ultimate goal — making a purchase. this is a small free product that will attract the potential customer. The task of a lead magnet is to generate leads, so this product is usually offered in exchange for an email or a phone number. Stage 1 – Lead Magnet: for copywriting agency, this is a check-list for creating selling headlines; for online art courses — lecture notes on dadaism. Example of a lead magnet: A good lead magnet can be identified by three characteristics: it solves the user’s problem; it’s clear from its description what is waiting for the user; it can be obtained immediately. In order to understand what will become your lead magnet, analyze the search queries’ statistics on your subject or explore the thematic forums. You need to understand the challenges your potential customers face on a daily basis. You don’t have to try to solve a global problem — your core product can handle it. A lead magnet is designed to meet a small but urgent need. You can buy windows in different ways this is a cheap product that’s interesting to users. It is attractive thanks to its price; potential customers get the opportunity to test your product and almost not spend. Thanks to the tripwire, a lead becomes a customer. Stage 2 – Tripwire: selling the cheapest plan for $2 instead of $20 for those who submit their email to get a lead magnet. Example of a tripwire: Importantly, be prepared for that the tripwire won’t make you any profit. Its goal is to attract users at a low cost and allow them to get to know you, turn a lead into a paying (although a little) customer. A good way to define a tripwire is to take the main product, separate one part from it and design it as an independent product. this is the main product around which your business is built and for which you need an autofunnel. It is for the purchase of the core product that a lead magnet and a tripwire prepared a user for. Stage 3 – Core product: for online art courses, this is the key course with feedback and a certificate. Example of the core product: are additional products and services that you offer along with the core product. Profit Maximizers Example: a customer has paid for online training and you offer them to buy an extended reference list. From Theory to Practice To build an autofunnel, you need to configure and run all the items that we listed above. It is much easier and more interesting to figure everything out on an example, so let’s imagine that we have an online school of confectioners. There are many training options: small workshops, webinars, occasional offline meetings, but your main product is a three-month course consisting of several modules. The course is quite expensive, but it is delivered by the country’s best confectioners, and in the end, you get a certificate confirmed by the confectioners’ association. What kind of autofunnel will help you increase sales and how to configure it? The Principles of Designing an Autofunnel 1. Create a Website or a Landing Page Before configuring an autofunnel, you need to prepare the basis, which is a website or a landing page where an autofunnel will work. Today, even a non-professional can generate their own single-page website; the main thing is to understand the basic principles of branding and select the appropriate service. Connect Google Analytics counter to your website. It is better to use both services to get more complete reports. The implementation of counters is free and it will not take you much time. With their help, you will be able to analyze user behavior on your website and fine-tune the autofunnel. Integrate the payment service into your website to open sales, and a CRM system to collect customer data and store it in one place. 2. Define your core product It’s quite simple: you probably know your core product. During the preparation stage of the autofunnel, it is worth checking the quality of the core product because you are making an effort exactly to sell it. The core product is the most expensive in the funnel so it is important that it contains the value for the customer. Let’s get back to our online school. Probably, clients more often sign up for and buy inexpensive workshops: there is no need to find time and budget for them. But the big course is your core product because it has the greatest value. The core product of an online school is a great course3. Make up and create a lead magnet There are lots of lead magnet options. Here are some of the most popular ones: checklist; guide / manual; cheat sheet; video lesson;i infographics; toolkit. A free workshop on meringue baking can become a lead magnet for the online confectionery school; a user submits their name and email in a special form and gets a link to a video lesion via email letter. 4. Create a tripwire A tripwire should be: simple and easy to use; affordably priced; encouraging to buy the core product (“if I’m getting this cool thing for a penny, then what am I going to get for the full price?”). The cost of a tripwire is determined by your niche. For example, if you sell the subscription service for $500 per month, offer a one-time consultation for $5. For our online confectionery school, a small course of five lessons on cakes will be a great tripwire. 5. Define Profit Maximizers Profit maximizers are products that complement the core product and help you increase your average order value. Profit maximizers are easy to identify; they are usually inexpensive add-on products such as smartphone safety glass. As a profit maximizer, a baking starter kit can be offered to buyers of large confectionery courses. 6. Tie it all together, come up with an autofunnel script. Once you have defined all the components of the autofunnel, the most interesting part begins: you need to connect them together and to declare the customer journey. It is very convenient to make up the scenario of an autofunnel using . Miro Let’s imagine a potential client of the confectionery school: a woman aged 30-40, married and on her maternity leave. She loves to cook and doesn’t like her old job in the office to which she is about to return. One day, she looks for a simple dessert recipe on the Internet and finds a free meringue baking workshop. A workshop is much better than simple recipes with pictures that she has seen before, so she does not hesitate to submit her email and gets a video lesson in the letter. From time to time, our heroine receives a newsletter with interesting recipes and spends a lot of time on the website. One day she sees a pop-up with an offer to take a small course on baking custard cakes. The course is paid, but it is very inexpensive, especially thanks to recipes from the mailing list that she has already managed to get carried away with baking. The woman pays for the course and is looking forward to the start. The small course was very useful; the woman learned 7 ways to prepare a cream. During this time, she became a regular visitor on the school’s website and has already found out about a large three-month course. She had no reason for a long doubt: the woman bought the training (and together with it she ordered a confectionery starter kit), successfully completed it, started baking cakes on request and never returned to the office again. A visitor comes to a website – Registration for a free workshop – Subscription to a newsletter – Pop-up with an invitation to a small course – Taking a small course – Subscription to a large course 7. Configure the autofunnel script and run it. Once the script has been made up, all you need is to solve the technical issues and get started. So, in order to implement the script and run the autofunnel we will need the following: A : we are going to offer a lead magnet in exchange of an email in it; lead generation pop-up with a link to a lead magnet; Welcome letter A that will maintain interest between the funnel stages; chain of content letters A pop-up with to a small course; an invitation A pop-up with . related products Each of these messages can be easily configured in Dashly. For example, a lead generation pop-up takes 7 minutes to be ready, and a welcome letter takes 10. Thus, the technical setup of the autofunnel will take you a couple of hours (along with the selection of images and copywriting). Then you’ll have to run it and enjoy the result:) It’s going to work out! Every business has its own strategy, and there is no universal formula for an ideal autofunnel. But you can get closer to the ideal: do not be afraid to carry out tests at every stage of the funnel. You can build a funnel by yourself, or you can keep your head free and entrust it to professionals. Like us:) (Originally published ) here

WTF Are Autofunnels and How To Design One for Your Business

React PWA with Cosmic JS In this tutorial I will show you how to build a progressive web app using React.js and . Our PWA will respond with status 200 when you are offline. The app will attain the last state of data and display it to you when you are offline. We will start with the basics and complete the app in full details. After completion we will deploy it to the Cosmic JS App Server, so let’s get started. Cosmic JS TL;DR Checkout the demo Download the codebase Admin Credentials: email: admin@abc.com password: admin What are We Building? As the title explained we are building a progressive web app (PWA) which will display news published by an admin. Let’s start by explaining what a PWA is in simple words: A PWA is a ordinary website that has some extra and unique features which make it extraordinary. Here are those features: You can use these apps while you are offline, that means these apps give a response code 200 while internet is disconnected Second most important feature is that you can install it on your device ( either desktop or mobile ) These apps are fully responsive in nature We will be implementing this app using React.js with the power of Cosmic JS. Let’s start. Requirements must be installed on your system to to run npm commands, with the help of which we will install react app. For more information, you can refer to . Node.js React Docs Getting Started Now that our system is configured with the required modules and tools, we are going to create a progressive web app project in React.js using Cosmic JS. Go to your any specific folder where you want to place your project and open console (terminal) and type the following command: npx create-react-app react-pwa here react-pwa is the name of your app and then goto created folder react-pwa and run command: npm start It will compile your basic React.js app and automatically opens in default browser. By default it runs on the port number 3000: http://localhost:3000/ Configure React App with Cosmic JS Till now, we have just implemented the front-end part of the PWA, now it is time to configure the server i.e. Cosmic JS server and database. It gives two in one facility. First of all, for free and create your first Bucket. Now create an Object-Type, which in our case is Admin. Similarly create two more object types named 1) News and 2) Comments. These three object types have different purposes: Admin will save the credentials of admin, News will save the news published by admin and Comments will save the comments posted by users. signup on Cosmic JS Now go to and generate read_key as well as write_key, and save all information of this page in a separate file on your system. Now place all of this information in the folder of your project and path will be: Settings > Basic Settings src>config>config.js To manage your project properly, you should create different folders for components, services, config files, css and images. It will help any third person to understand your code properly. All of these folders should reside in src folder. So create them first and jump to next step. Ready Made Bucket For this project you can directly import a bucket to your dashboard, in that bucket we have already created object-types. You have to download bucket.json from our and then just follow the steps: Choose default bucket > Go to Settings > go to Import / Export and click the button “Add import file”. It will import the bucket.json file. git repo Here we have created the platform to implement our PWA, so let’s move to the next one. Admin Login In our bucket, there is an object-type “Admin”. Create an object with title admin, and metafields email & password. You can give the values of email and passwords according to you. Here we gave email: and password: admin. Later you can use them for admin login in our demo. admin@abc.com Create a login page for admin in src>components>login.js On this page we are simply logging the admin in. We have statically created the email and password in the object-type “admin” and with those credentials we are logging him in. Here we imported the authentication service and in the onSubmit() function we are calling the login() function which is declared in the authentication service. In componentDidMount() we simply applied navigation when admin already logged in. Dashboard Component In this component we simply displayed the three links: Home, Add News and Logout. From here admin can navigate to main page, of can add a news or can logged himself out. On loading we applied navigation which will take the admin to home page if he is logged out and still trying to access this page. On logout() function we cleared the local storage and on the link Add News we navigated the admin to addnews.js. Location of this file is: src>components>dashboard.js Add News This component is accessible only for admin. He can post news over here. He can add title, description and body of the news. It will save the complete thread to object-type ‘news’ on the Cosmic JS server. Location of this component is: src>components>addnews.js Home Page On home page we are displaying all news which are published by the admin. First of all check its coding: This is the news.js and it is fetching as well as displaying the news on the home page of our app. We are explaining the working of getNews() method. If your device is online, then it is fetching data from backend and displaying on the template and also saving it on browser for offline use too. If the device is offline, then it will get the saved data from browser memory and will show to the user. Here you are seeing the title and description of the news and click to “Complete News” to read full story. This link will take you to next component: Single News Component This component is fetching the single news which you clicked from the home page. Check its coding first: It is displaying the single news as well as there is an option of comment also. Comments related to the post are displayed here and you can add comments also. singleNews() method is fetching the news at one time and we applied a filter to get the selected news. allComments() function is getting all comments and filtering the comments related to this single post only. Services There are two services named authentication service and news service. Let us explain them one by one: This is only for logging the admin in. There is one method defined which is searching the email and password supplied the the login page and returns the result to calling method. Authentication Service: This is the main service of this project which is handling almost everything here. Go through its coding first: News Service: Let’s explain its methods one by one: addNews(): It takes four parameters: title, description, newsbody and date and saves on the object type news getNews(): As the name specifies, it fetch all news from the object-type news submitComment(): This method submits the comment in the object type “comment” allComments(): This get the submitted comments in object-type “comments” on the Cosmic JS server Data Modelling We managed data on Cosmic JS properly, for this we created some object-types to understand the nature of each datum. Here is three object types : admin, news and comment. Admin stores the information of admin, and news stores the news published by admin. Comment object-type is storing the comments published by readers of our news app. What Have We Built Till Now? I want to make clear that our app is an ordinary app until now (in development mode); it doesn’t have any PWA features, so let’s start making it progressive in nature. When we created this app, it already created a file serviceWorker.js in the src folder, which handles the progressive nature of the app. At the time of online use, it automatically stores the static data of the app and reflects when the app is offline. Our app is not behaving a PWA because in serviceWorker it is coded to become a PWA only in production mode. So make its build and then run build, you will get some messages in the console like this: This is the static data capturing of the app. If you want to capture the dynamic data, you need to code it manually. We did this in the news.js file. We stored the app data when the app is online and it automatically called when app will be offline. So to enjoy its PWA feature, run the following commands: npm run build serve -s build Our app is partial-progressive in nature now. It is storing data while offline but it can’t be installed on the device yet. We’ll make that happen in the next step. Make App Complete PWA To make it complete PWA, here is the final step. We need to edit manifest.json, which is present in the public folder. It should look like: Here we added path of two icons, one for desktop and the other for mobile. Their size should be exactly the same and these two icons should be present in the public folder. Start_url is showing the path of build. This is the main basic coding of manifest and now our app is pure progressive in nature. In the above screenshot you can clearly check that Chrome browser is giving the option to install this React app on your system. Now we are checking out app with lighthouse tool, which is provided by Google to check PWAs, check output of lighthouse below: In report each milestone achieved by our app except 7th, which is an https related and will be fixed as we deployed it to our Cosmic JS server which supports HTTPs. Deploy on Cosmic Server Now our app is ready and needs some improvement before deployment on Cosmic server. Make sure the followings: A public GitHub repo ( private also available if you have connected your Git account ) should be matched Heroku requirements You need to follow some steps: Install express with command: npm install --save express Modify your package.json file, and add the following code Now create a file app.js in the root folder and add the following code in it Finally you made all necessary changes and it is now ready to deploy. Now go to: and click button deploy to Cosmic. After successful deployment you will receive an email and click on "view app" button to view the app. bucket>setting>deployment Verdict It is clear that with the help of Cosmic JS we can create powerful apps and can deploy on their server without any server setting or configuration. Here we created and deployed our React.js progressive application on Cosmic server easily without any difficulty. You don’t need to install any extra software to deploy over here. For any query or comment related to building apps in Cosmic JS, and . reach out to us on Twitter join the conversation on Slack

How to Build a PWA in React.js and Cosmic JS

The holiday season is behind us and the new year has begun. It’s a traditional time for individuals and companies — including those of us exploring the brave new world of technology — to assess what we’ve accomplished, and to set targets for the year to come. blockchain It’s 2019, and it’s time for the blockchain world to get real. It has been all too easy, until now, to get caught up in the crypto hype, lambos, market volatility, and irrational exuberance of this new technology. But that chapter of blockchain’s history is rapidly coming to a close. One after another, technically dazzling projects begun without a clear focus on real users, distribution models, and real-world use cases will lose the race. In many such cases, start-up funding will run out before the products find user bases to serve. Crypto projects can survive the shake-out and prosper in 2019 and beyond only if they have a clear idea of who their products and services are intended for and what those users need. It’s time to get sharp on blockchain customer personas. Personas for Blockchain Development Product Managers have long utilized to help steer product development towards meeting the needs of real world users. personas Customer are fictional characters that create to represent the different users of a specific . They exist to help communicate research about their ideal groups of users — and give faces to these groups. … Personas matter because they represent demographics. must make informed decisions about who their customers are, what they need, and how their product will be the solution. — personas product managers product product managers a product’s core customer Product managers Personas help product managers make these decisions. The Aha Group The increasingly popular framework further focuses product management and innovation on deconstructing a job that certain personas are trying to get done such that product is built to help get the job done rather than building features or technology in search of a use case. Jobs to be Done In this post I propose three personas to help focus blockchain product management: Mappy, Happy, and Dappy. I encourage the blockchain community to provide feedback on these personas, and to help develop them and improve them — as a collective community resource towards achieving mainstream adoption of blockchain products. Meet Mappy, Happy, and Dappy Most blockchain projects to-date have focused on building decentralized applications, known as “DApps,” (or “ ”) only to find that the technology, scalability, and usability of blockchain is not yet ready for mainstream DApp adoption. Impatient crypto speculators are known to decry: “where’s the usage?” when it comes to DApps. Within the industry there is widespread hope that DApps will begin to gain some traction by 2020 and everyone is waiting for the first must-have killer DApp to emerge. Dappys A smaller set of blockchain projects have prioritized developing blockchain solutions for existing centralized businesses with large user bases. The counter thesis amongst this crowd is: DApps are part of an exciting future, but that future could take years to materialize and gain consumer adoption; meanwhile there are mainstream businesses with millions of users (we call them “MApps” or “ ”) who envision delivering more customer-centric experiences and developing competitive advantage by moving parts of their businesses onto public blockchains. In doing so, centralized businesses could drive requirements for blockchain usability and scalability to enable mass-market adoption. Mappys Both groups believe in an increasingly decentralized future. The healthy debate is over which comes first: decentralized apps or decentralized app users. It’s the age-old product management question of which matters more: features or distribution? One of the world’s all-time greatest product managers, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, comes down squarely on the side of distribution: [W]e want to create great products that people love, that gives them moments of magic, it’s part of why we do what we do. But if you are not building the strategy of product distribution, into what you are doing, then you are relying entirely on a form of: running into a field with a large metal pole hoping that lightning strike, and that’s not usually a winning strategy. (Greylock, November 10th 2016, 4 ) — LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman. m:54s No matter which side of that debate you come down on, building the right product for your target customers and their users is critical to gaining acceptance and distribution. Towards that end, Francesco Pacella and I developed three personas that our product teams rely on every day at OST : Mappy, Happy, and Dappy. is a mainstream application whose core code runs on centralized servers. The Mappy company is curious about dipping some toes into blockchain and putting some transactions “on-chain” to provide increased customer value, build user trust, and gain competitive differentiation. If it works, Mappy would look to decentralize more transactions over time. Mappy typically has a large existing user base and they’re interested in blockchain to the extent that it improves their user engagement and helps with their key KPIs, but they will certainly resistant to taking a step back on user experience due to integrating blockchain into their app. Mappy envisions a hybrid application that combines the benefits of Mappy with the “programmable money” features of blockchains like Ethereum. Happy is intrigued by the idea of having smart contracts govern business logic to boost customer trust and empowerment. Happy on the cutting edge, developing a fully decentralized application whose backend code runs on a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Dappy is prepared to go all-in on blockchain, smart contracts, user anonymity, and even governance. Dappy is Mappy, Happy, and Dappy may sound like Scrooge McDuck’s lost nephews, but these personas represent three types of businesses, differentiated primarily by the degree of decentralization they are ready to embrace in the near term. Knowing which of Mappy, Happy, or Dappy you are building for, and understanding the key differences between them, is critical to building successful blockchain products that gain end-user traction. These profiles serve as more than reminders. Product managers rely upon detailed customer personas to help them understand target customers so they can tailor solutions to their needs. Building for Mappy Mappy is a mainstream application with an existing user-base. Mappy is likely less impressed by flashy technology than by rock-solid reliability. As a blockchain developer serving Mappy, you better come with a viable scalability solution for Mappy to onboard millions of users and billions of transactions onto your blockchain. Mappy’s interested in blockchain technology as a means to boost KPIs like user acquisition, engagement, and retention. When speaking to Mappy, we recommend focusing on blockchain as an enabler of business results, not as a grand vision for the future. Mappy cares less about complete decentralization of the consensus mechanism on day one and is willing to take a long term path to decentralization. Proof of Authority may be an acceptable starting place with a roadmap to an open validator set over time. Mappy is intrigued by how Blockchain could be deployed to empower users with greater ownership of the value they generate through their contributions to the company’s ecosystem, greater flexibility in how they use and share it, and greater transparency on how it is distributed. Mappys are often interested in using Blockchain to power more open and transparent loyalty and rewards programs. They envision using blockchain tokens to reward users for loyalty and for rewarding actions and content contributions. Mappy is also intrigued by the interoperability potential from blockchain tokens, enabling Mappy users to earn with Mappy and seamlessly spend elsewhere, and vice versa. Some Mappys are turning to token economies as a way to simplify and reduce transaction costs of cross-border payments. This is particularly important for companies with users in countries that restrict cross-border money flows or struggle to support international transfers due to a weak domestic financial system. Mappy’s developers likely have very little understanding and knowledge of blockchain. Don’t expect them to write solidity code on their own. They’ll want Blockchain served up to them in bite-size snippets that they can easily integrate into their apps, with APIs, SDKs, recipes, and UX guidelines. They won’t immediately be familiar with concepts like “gas,” multi-sigs, consensus algorithms, or smart contracts. You’re going to need to simultaneously dumb it down while also helping educate. Mappy’s developers will need a sandbox connected to a testnet and the ability to launch betas and pilots on mainnet to a sample of their user base at minimal risk, before on-boarding large numbers of users. The “jobs to be done” of Mappy’s blockchain team is to prove to their bosses that blockchain can be a core differentiator to get ahead of the competition and grow their business. Mappy is used to web-based dashboards and mobile apps for analytics and reporting. Don’t expect to just point Mappy at a block explorer and tell them to have at it on their own. Mappy’s users likely have very little understanding and knowledge of blockchain. Don’t expect them to be immediately comfortable with writing down private keys, understanding what a public/private key is in the first place, signing transactions, or paying for gas. From a “jobs to be done” standpoint, the farthest thing from the Mappy user’s mind is how to use Mappy on a blockchain, rather they just want to continue to get joy and value from the Mappy app, without caring (yet) if transactions are on a blockchain or not. Mappy will be less inclined to expose their users to crypto market volatility. You’ll need to consider use of stablecoins and economy stabilization mechanisms. Mappy will not want to take on any legal, regulatory, or licensing risk (e.g. for money transmission or for being a custodial service). You’re going to need to help them navigate the legal landscape and in most cases take on all legal, regulatory, and licensing responsibility on their behalf. Compliance is largely national and local, so you’ll need to research and deploy a globally local legal strategy. Building for Happy Happy has a lot of similarities to Mappy, but Happy’s blockchain ambitions go further, to include the creation of complex rules for the creation and distribution of value and greater “on-chain” decentralization to increase user trust. Happy embraces the notion of “programmable money” and decentralized markets that can reshape and drive their business in fundamental ways. Happy seeks to shift parts of their business logic into on-chain smart contracts that auto-execute when certain pre-programmed conditions are met. Some Happys want to introduce the use of tokenized digital assets onto their platforms, including non-fungible tokens that users can own and trade. Happy is likely to want to see a faster path to network decentralization and a decentralized consensus engine vs. Mappy. Proof of Authority may be a non-starter for Happy. Happy may be more blockchain ambitious than Mappy, but don’t expect most Happys to be writing directly to protocols. Happy is going to want to experiment with blockchain on-chain logic before jumping all-in. Happy will need simple web-based tools for functions such as smart contract writing and deploying on-chain logic. Some Happy’s see an opportunity to create centralized applications with refined UX on top of open source protocols. Building for Dappy Dappy is a decentralized app running on a decentralized network. An open decentralized consensus protocol validates Dappy transactions. Dappy does not collect or retain any personal user data. Dappy likely has no installed base of users. Dappy’s developers are tuned in to the latest blockchain technologies and developers. They’re comfortable developing directly on protocols. It is expected that all of Dappy’s source code shall be provided under open-source license and should be available for people to see, and edit as they see fit. Dappy’s users are expected to be more blockchain savvy than Mappy and Happy. There are some expectations that the governance of Dappy overtime shall be decentralized, with users of Dappy holding the power for key decisions. The expectation often is that Dappy as an organization could eventually fade away and the application and network it operates on could continue to run on its own (such as and Ethereum do today). Bitcoin Achieving Blockchain Product Market Fit In his seminal , Marc Andreessen posited that the only thing that matters for startups is getting to product market fit. post for Stanford University in 2007 The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. . The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening . The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening . Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens My contention, in fact, is that they fail they never get to product/market fit. because Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: (call this “BPMF”) and (“APMF”). before product/market fit after product/market fit by Marc Andreessen, June 25, 2007 Getting your product personas right is critical for achieving product market fit — whether you’re building tools to help a Mappy deploy blockchain tokens to incentivize and rewards their users, or the next great Dappy to redefine prediction markets, if you don’t understand who you’re building for, it’s nearly impossible to achieve product market fit. Mappy, Happy, and Dappy have very different needs and very different internal and external user expectations. Understanding those needs and building for them is key to building apps that gain acceptance with Mappy’s, Happy’s, or Dappy’s internal teams, and then ultimately to gaining adoption with their end users. About the Author is Founder and CEO of , Open Simple Token. OST powers blockchain economies for forward thinking businesses, focused primarily on and with tens of millions of users. OST’s APIs, SDKs, dashboards, wallets, and protocols provide everything businesses with millions of users need to integrate Branded Tokens into their apps in minutes. OST also leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses and the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OpenST Protocols are made available for any developer or Dappy to utilize. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. For more information, please visit . Jason Goldberg OST Mappys Happys via open source https://ost.com

Meet Mappy, Happy, and Dappy: Personas for Blockchain Product Management

This list concludes top 14 web designer skills you must have in 2018. You can learn and improve your web design skills to become better. With the rapid development of the internet, Web designers and web developers have become quite popular in recent years. With popularity, however, comes competition, begging the question, how does one improve their web design and development skills in order to remain competitive? , obviously, they have clear boundaries and divisions of labor in their professional roles. With the development of technology and changes in product design, the skills of web designers are no longer limited to design, but encroach on becoming “ ”. Web designers vs. web developers full stack designers What skills do web designers need? How does one go about maximizing their salary in this field? You can get answers to all these questions in this article. Mockplus has summed up a for your reference. We hope it will help you to in your quest of becoming an excellent, well-paid web designer. How does one become a web designer? web designer skills list for 2018 Before looking into the web designer skills list, let’s clarify what a web designer does in a company, and what kind of skills are required. Below is a web designer job description template: Web designer job description from Workable This Web Designer job description template is optimized for posting on online job boards or careers pages. It is easy to customize for your company and specific designer or developer duties and responsibilities. Post Now on Job Boards Web Designer Responsibilities Include: Executing all visual design stages from concept to final hand-off to engineering Conceptualizing original website design ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness to complex roadblocks Job brief Weare looking for a talented Web Designer to create amazing user experiences. The ideal candidate should have an eye for clean and artful web design. They should also have superior user interface design skills. The successful candidate will be able to translate high-level requirements into interaction flows and artifacts. They will be able to transform them into beautiful, intuitive, and functional designs. Responsibilities Execute all visual design stages from concept to final hand-off to engineering Conceptualize original website design ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness to complex roadblocks Create wireframes, storyboards, user flows, process flows and site maps to communicate interaction and design ideas Present and defend designs and key deliverables to peers and executive level stakeholders Establish and promote design guidelines, best practices, and standards Requirements Proven work experience as a web designer Demonstrable graphic design skills with a strong portfolio Solid experience in creating wireframes, storyboards, user flows, process flows, and sitemap Proficiency in Photoshop, Illustrator or other visual design and wire-framing tools Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for rapid prototyping Experience working in an Agile/Scrum development process Excellent visual design skills with sensitivity to user-system interaction Ability to solve problems creatively and effectively Up-to-date with the latest Web trends, techniques, and technologies BS/MS in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design or aVisual Arts subject Through the description of the required skills in the job template above, we can get a general idea of what a web designer does. It provides lots of information about what skills are needed, which design tools one should master, and which technical skills are required. For a better understanding and to help guide new Web designers, Mockplus has divided Web designer skills into three categories: professional skills, technical skills, and soft skills. Web Designer’s Professional Skills Then from the aspect of professional skills, the necessary proficiencies of web designers are as follows: 1. Design Tool Craftsmen always have a set of tools. As the job descriptions listed above, a web designer must use several essential design software applications. Although it is now possible to design websites in a web browser, tools such as Photoshop, Sketch, and Mockplus are very useful tools for image processing, icon design, and prototyping. Using the right tools at the right stage will make your work more effective. : powerful image processing for graphic and web design. PS (Photoshop) : referred to as “AI”, is a very good vector graphics processing tool, mainly used for font design, graphic design, product packaging design, book /magazine layout, and illustration design. Adobe Illustrator : referred to as “AE”, is a graphic video processing software introduced by Adobe. In a nutshell, it is a dynamic version of PS, which is very powerful with a complicated operation. Adobe After Effects : a powerful , free for download. Mockplus interactive prototyping/wireframing tool : An online design collaboration tool for digital product teams, including designers and engineers. It connects your design work from design to development and helps teams with design handoff. Mockplus iDoc 2. Design Sense Having a good sense of design is very important for web designers. Web design is more than just making a good-looking website. You must have an understanding of design elements such as typeset, images, and basic design principles such as layout principles, and more. form design principles 3. UX Design UX stands for user experience, or how people feel when they use the site. To provide a good UX, you need to research your users to help create user personas ( ) and use sitemaps to lay out pages and content. This helps you understand the user’s path during actual site visits. Through repeated testing, a website’s design can be improved, ameliorating user experience, and thus increasing user conversions. 18 Free Excellent User Persona Templates for inspiration 4. Responsive Design With the growth of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, more and more people use small screens to view and read web page information. As a web designer, you should understand the principles of responsive web design to keep your web pages readable on small screens. ( ) 12 best responsive web design tutorials to get you started! 5. Graphic Design . If you are a web designer with graphic design skills, this will enhance your marketability. Web design is different from graphic design 6. Adobe Animate Animation can make a dull web page dynamic. An appropriate animation will make your website more attractive. Especially for name-brand clothing, cars, film, and television websites, an animation is particularly important. Visual impact will help with brands identity and recognition. Web Designer’s Technical Skills With the rapid development of web development technology, the requirements for web designers are getting higher and higher. In addition to being proficient in professional skills, understanding the necessary web development language will have a longer-term benefit for you. 1. HTML Some people might not think Web designers should master HTML, however, whether you are a developer or not, you should know basic HTML/CSS. This will help you to more easily read, edit and solve problems. However, depending on your actual work as a designer/developer, the level and scope you need to know may be even broader. In any case, you should be aware of how styles and colors are controlled and adjusted by code. These skills are extremely useful in the long run. 2. CSS CSS and HTML are partners in website development and are the basic building blocks of web page structure and style. HTML determines the structure of the site, and CSS handles the visual appearance. For example, CSS lets you adjust colors, change fonts, or add stunning backgrounds. 3. JavaScript With the ability to write design code in HTML and CSS, you can help render yourself more competitive by learning to program in JavaScript. As a web designer you know JavaScript, that may help you solve big problems in actual work. In addition, according to a survey by StackOverflow, JS is the most popular programming language for . full stack developers 4. Web Server Management Most web designers think they can ignore the server, but the web server and downtime issues are inevitable. You don’t need to be a back-end expert, but understanding how a web server and its basic features work will help you solve problems faster. Web Designer’s Soft Skills Now that we’ve discussed professional and technical skills, we should look at adding some soft skills to help keep our web design work more organized. 1.Time management Whether you are a freelancer or work for a company, time management skills are important. The rapid updating of project iterations means that the design must also be updated from time to time. Good web designers need to manage their schedules and follow up on project needs. 2. Project Management Project management is a key job skill in almost every industry, and web design is no exception. Good project management skills not only benefit the project but also benefit your career. 3. SEO SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is useful for anyone building a website. Web designers and web developers should at least understand the basics of SEO, and that will be a plus for your work. Many factors can affect the ranking of a website in a search engine, from the content of the site to its inbound links to its download speed, performance, and its mobile-friendliness. All of these are factors that web designers should pay attention to when designing. Once you know SEO, you can use these factors to make the site more attractive to search engines, thus making it easier to find for customers. 4. Customer Service Although customer service is not a technical skill, providing excellent customer service is a requirement in order for a good web designer to win customers and achieve better results. Even the best web designers/developers may fail. Summary: This list concludes the top 14 web designer skills you must have in 2018. As you can see, there is no mystery to becoming a web designer. These skills form the foundation for the knowledge required. Keep learning and improving your Web designer skills, that’s the only secret to becoming a good web designer. More resource for web designers: The Best Mockup & Wireframing Design Tools & Apps for UI/UX Designers in 2018 10 Best Steps Guide on How to Become a Web Designer The Best UI/UX Design Books & Resources for Designers (Updated)

Top 14 Web Designer Skills You Must Have in 2018

I see most founders worry about their Landing page, about how it looks and how it converts… But focusing on the Landing page simply doesn’t get you any results! That’s only scratching the surface of what you need to do to turn your visitors into customers. In this article, I’ll show you why you need a funnel, what makes a high converting funnel and examples of the best funnels for SaaS startups (at the end). You have the wrong expectations about a Landing page Most startup founders expect to put a simple Landing page and magically convert a good chunk of their visitors… No objections…no questions…100% low touch…plus some Magic… Nope…This never happens! Pretty pages don’t convert, sexy generic graphics work and using other websites as reference doesn’t work either! Related article: Stop looking at Websites from Bigger Companies for Reference, it Doesn’t work! _Looking at websites from bigger companies is a very biased and dangerous approach to getting reference for your Landing…_www.cortes.design Stop Looking at Websites From Bigger Companies for Reference, It Doesn't Work! (+ What to do… If you don’t make this switch in your mindset you will look for the wrong metrics and expect the Landing page will do all the work. This simply leads you to endless rounds of iterations without any significant increase in conversions. The only thing that increases conversion The CRO world is full of noise… They give you tiny tweaks, color changes, “physiological” tactics and results that not replicable. Here’s the only thing that truly converts visitors… . answering objections An objection is simply a question (or a set of questions) that people need to get answered before they are ready to buy or even try your product. **If these questions go unanswered they won’t ever be comfortable to convert.**‍ How can you fix this? It’s all about finding the right message to the right audience (more info in the article below). Related article: How to identify the right message for your Landing page (this is the process I use for my clients). _In this article, I will show you the process I developed that enabled me to turn 4-5 page feature lists, targeting 160+…_www.cortes.design Use This Process To Identify Which Message Will Make Your SaaS Landing page Convert the Most! Proper Funnel Vs Landing page The big problem here is that you expect the Landing page to do all the work and answer all the objections. ‍ **This leads to 2 big problems.**‍ #1: Not explaining the right things to people at different stages of the buying process. #2: End up with a very vague message that converts no one (while trying to appeal to everyone). The idea with the funnel is to divide the audience depending on how ready they are to buy so we can properly qualify and follow up with them until they convert. ‍ Here are some of the advantages of proper funnels vs only focusing on Landing pages. Funnels are easier to track Image from Hotjar.com You can track your own funnel using Google Analytics or Hotjar which is more user friendly and it is probably my favorite analytics tool, you can get a ton of features for free, more info here. ‍ **Here is when you notice where people are leaving and what you need to optimize.**‍ Tracking how your Landing page converts without any reference to the other pages simply doesn’t mean anything. Also, Landing pages can be deceiving as an increase in conversion might just mean pushing the problem to the next step of the funnel which still leads to not acquiring more customers (even though the “conversion” increased). Funnels can “convert everyone” With funnels, you can plan paths for different user groups that might have different needs or that might have different questions. You can’t answer all of those on a Landing page! You need a funnel to divide and qualify your visitors properly. ‍ alone. You will eventually turn a good chunk of these leads into customers. A proper funnel or “user path” can lead to 2–3x the leads The Anatomy of a good funnel for SaaS A proper funnel for your Startup should… SaaS Be prepared for cold traffic Cold traffic is the hardest traffic to convert as they don’t know anything about your company and your product. Even though is way harder to convert people from cold traffic it’s the only way to using your website to scale your company. ‍ ‍ Where else can you replicate the same “pitch” thousands and thousands of times over? Although you need a “pitch” that works in the first place ;) Related article: Optimizing for traffic temperatures in SaaS Websites _These people don't know anything about your product, your company or how you can fix their problems and as you can…_www.cortes.design Optimizing for Traffic Temperature In SaaS Landing Pages Provide at least 2 alternatives Unfortunately, most people won’t be ready to convert right away so you will need a few alternative CTA’s that are less of a commitment than converting right away but still capture those leads until they are ready to buy later on. Without these alternatives, you will only be able to convert 3–5% of the number of people you could be converting. Related article: Why SaaS Startups are missing out on 70% of conversions (+ how to fix it) _Most people are simply not ready to convert right away so your website should be a predictable system to convert…_www.cortes.design Why SaaS Startups are Missing Out on 70+% of Conversions (+ How To Fix It) Be simple to tweak and track Try to make your funnels as simple as possible! If the funnel you are creating is starting to get too overwhelming then you probably haven’t found the best/simplest message to use on your website. It might still convert somewhat well but if it’s not simple you can forget about being able to track what things are working best so you can double down on them because it will be very hard to tell it apart. Resource: A great (free) tool to design those funnels You can get a breakdown of this funnel in step#5 of my free video course , this is the tool I use to plan the funnels for my clients before I even begin to design the pages. Funnelytics It’s very simple to use and has most of the features you will ever need. And guess what? You can use it for free! Examples of good funnels for SaaS Startups Here are few examples of good funnels for SaaS startups. This is not a complete list but here we have the most important/useful ones (in no particular order) High touch/Demo focused funnel High touch/demo driven funnel for SaaS startups My favorite, the most predictable and the brings the most revenue. This is one of the hardest to get right especially if you don’t have the money for ad spend but it also brings the biggest reward. For high touch and/or high ticket SaaS you should focus on the results your product could bring and explain briefly how your product can get there. The reason your Landing page should focus on results is because if you are selling a more expensive or complex product the commitment to convert is even higher so you need to make a great impression. If your product can’t generate great results you shouldn’t be charging these prices anyways. Here’s an example from Copilotai.co. In this case they use a Webinar as a lead magnet but the main goal is to get you on a call with them so they can sell you. This is extremely effective and even enables you to figure out your customer acquisition cost to see if you can really scale this up with paid ads (next funnel). If done right it will create enough curiosity to schedule demos that you know your sales team (or yourself) can convert into customers or even leads that you can use drip email campaigns that will eventually turn into demo calls. Another great use for this funnel is to get demo calls almost as customer interviews so you can get as much feedback on your product as possible. In this case, because you probably don’t have results to show you can focus on the biggest benefits your product brings. For example…if you say “You could reduce X mistakes by 50%” (or something similar) then that person could have a rough idea of what the ROI could be for your product although it’s not as effective as the results driven approach. The Paid traffic funnel Paid traffic funnel for SaaS Startups This funnel could be similar to the one above but you could use more retargeted ads and get more cold traffic in general. If you are using paid traffic you have the ability to get a laser focused target that will most likely be interested in your product. A common mistake is to drive this paid traffic to the Landing page which should not be the case! You will be bringing a hyper focused audience into a generic page which doesn’t make much sense. People will only convert if they feel that solution is tailored for them, so you will need to make a custom page for that audience. Well it’s really not! Does that sound like a lot of work? With the right skills you could create great dynamic templates that would be hyper focused and easy to replicate without people noticing that’s the case. ‍ Here’s an example from a client of mine (Bitrefill).‍ In this case, I’ve designed a template so they could target different combinations of vouchers, cryptocurrencies and audiences all generated automatically!‍ Example for Hotels.com + Ethereum Examples for Nintendo + Bitcoin Same page but different message and target audience. This way they were able to use social media + SEO to bring exactly the right people into the exact offer they wanted. The result? Conversion rates that are nothing short of amazing (can’t reveal the exact number in this case) :) The Content Marketing funnel Content Funnel for SaaS Startups Marketing This is a basic one but has a lot of tweaks that can make or break it (I’ll probably an article on this alone). Basically, in this case, your landing page would be a blog post which means you will have to convert a good chunk of your visitors into checking out your service (homepage) or sign up for your lead magnets. Otherwise, you might write great content and get a good amount of traffic but you won’t convert anyone :( For example, if you look at I also have several CTA’s and convert a huge amount of people into seeing what services I offer (on my Homepage). If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get any sign ups for my free courses (aka leads) and inbound calls for potential projects. my blog Want a proper funnel that turns visitors into customers? There’s a lot that could go wrong when building systems like these (without proper experience) but once you get them running they can generate a lot of leads and revenue for your startup. Would you like to discuss how this would work for your business? Let’s chat about your current problems and what we can do to generate more revenue from your website. ‍Schedule Free Strategy Session here Originally published at www.cortes.design .

Dear SaaS Startups…You don’t need a Landing page, you need a proper Funnel! Here’s why (+how)…

Capybara is a web-based automation framework tool for testing Rails apps. It helps you to create that simulate how users would interact with your application through the browser. functional tests It is a fantastic tool for testing your application through the browser! doesn’t interact with the website, it’s just a layer between you and the web driver. For this, you can use web driver or any of the other drivers that Capybara supports. Capybara Selenium Configuring Capybara can easily integrate with common test frameworks used in Rails. It is mostly used together with for writing feature and, but less commonly, . Capybara RSpec controller test Before you get started, you need to add the following gems to the :test group in your and run : Gemfile bundle install group :test do  gem 'capybara'  gem 'selenium-webdriver'end Testing with Capybara Capybara comes with a user-friendly ( omain pecific anguage), which offers helper methods for extracting information, inputting data, testing, or clicking around. DSL D S L By default, Capybara will only locate visible elements. This is because a real user would not be able to interact with non-visible elements. You can read more about this at rubydoc.info . Common DSL options Here we will cover the most commonly used for interacting with elements in your web application: DSL actions specific elements and manipulate them: Find find_field('field_name').valuefind_field(id: 'field_id').valuefind_link('link_name', visible: all).visible? find_button('button_name').click This is one of the most important functions should know if you want to manipulate your elements. You can use it to find your links, buttons and fields and check if they are visible to the user, or click on them. will always wait for an element to appear on the page before raising an error. every good programmer Find Interact with the web application by : following links and buttons click_link('link_id')click_link('link_text')click_button('button_name')click_on('link_text') # clicks on either link or button Always use one of these options when you want to access a link or a button. You can do this by using id, title, text within tag or value of the element. Interact with : form elements fill_in('Title', :with => 'Example')choose('radio_button')check('checkbox') uncheck('checkbox')attach_file('image', 'image_path') # upload a fileselect('option', from: 'select_box') # select from dropdown Whenever you want to fill up your form you should use one of these possibilities. Depending on the type of the element the present values are: id, name or related label element. The only exeption is attach_file, it can only accept id and name. with: Navigate trough pages visit('url_name') You can easily navigate trough page with this simple command or only access the current page with: expect(page).to have_current_path(path_name) the page for the existence of certain elements: Query expect(page).to have_selector('table tr')expect(page).to have_content('content_name') Restrict certain actions within a specific area of the page with : scoping within(:xpath, 'actual_xpath') do  fill_in 'Title', with: 'Example'end Use the method when you want to use actions only in a specific area or use these special methods: for a specific fieldset and for a specific table. within within_fieldset within_table with the following methods: Debug save_and_open_page # current snapshot of the page save_sceenshot('screenshot_name.png')save_and_open_screenshot # saves and automatically opens the screenshot When you want to save the snapshot of the page, just add one of these lines to your code, or you can also retrieve the current state of an element with: print page_name.html Matchers When trying to find an element by using the DSL or XPath, it is common to have two or more . You can customize the way Capybara find elements by using: matches — Finds exact matches of an element. Capybara.exact — Controls how Capybara behaves when multiple elements match. Capybara.match To avoid getting error when more than one match is found, you should consider using the following matching strategies supported by Capybara: Ambiguous match — This will simply pick the first element that matches. :first — This will raise an error if more than one element is found. :one — This finds all matching elements but only the first exactly matching element is returned and the rest is discarded. :prefer_exact — If is set to , it will behave like . Otherwise, it will try to find the exact element. Once again, an error is raised if multiple elements are found. If no element is found, a new search is performed. :smart Capybara.exact true :one JavaScript and Asynchronous Calls allows you to interact with an element on the page that isn’t present yet. This can happen when using JavaScript to creates a new element on the page: Asynchronous JavaScript click_link('test')click_link('foo') Once you click on the ‘test’ link it will trigger an asynchronous process, which will show the ‘foo’ link. Clicking on the ‘foo’ will most likely raise an error since that link doesn’t exist yet. Capybara can handle this by waiting for a brief period of time. You can adjust the default waiting period (the default is 2 seconds) with: . Capybara.default_max_wait_time Capybara and RSpec Using is as simple as adding in the file. To be able to do this, you will need beforehand. Capybara together with RSpec require 'capybara/rails' rspec_helper.rb RSpec installed describe 'users' do  let! :each do    @user = FactoryGirl.create(:user)    login_as(@user)  end

  describe GET user#edit' do    it 'should update user' do      visit edit_user_path(@user)      within('#edit_user_path') do        fill_in 'email', with: '[email protected]'      end      click_button 'Save'      find_button('Save').click      expect(page).to have_content 'Success'    end endend This was a simple example that shows how you can use Capybara and RSpec at the same time by editing the user. Hope this article helped you understand what Capybara the rodent can do to your test environment! Subscribe and stay tuned for the upcoming articles! Originally published at kolosek.com on February 19, 2018.

Start testing with Capybara

Most guides and blog posts around ActionCable focus around simple chat apps to show the typical websocket workflow. That is great, but how is ActionCable suppose to fit into your everyday SaaS-like Rails application? The following is a mash-up of content from my upcoming book . The book guides you from humble beginnings through deploying an app to production. The book is now in pre sale, and you can grab a free chapter right now! Build A SaaS App in Rails 6 Also, the beta for my new project is has been released. If you’re losing track of pull requests, have old ones lingering around or would just love a dashboard that aggregates these requests over multiple services (Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket), . Pull Manager check it out First, what is ActionCable? In case you haven’t heard about it before… ActionCable is Rail’s built-in library with both server-side and client-side components to push data through websockets. Websockets is a computer protocol that allows data to pass over a TCP connection. In layman’s terms, it is a way to push and pull data outside of the HTTP request/response cycle.While most times data will flow from the server to the client-side, it is possible for data to flow both ways in Rails. The process that is normally used in WebSocket and real-time is called Pub/Sub, or Publication/Subscription. You will sometimes also see this referred to as a message bus structure in regards to the actual communication channels. The idea in Pub/Sub is that as an action occurs and Publishes a message, another system may be Subscribed to that type of message. Then the subscription will receive the event and with it. do something In most cases, this whole system is used in the following type of interaction: 1. User 1 adds an item to a collection via the regular HTTP interaction in a web app.2. User 2 is on the collection’s `index` page viewing the content.3. User 1’s change is saved and then published through a message bus.4. User 2’s browser is subscribing to collection update events and get’s the published message.5. User 2’s browser updates the collection to include the new item without User 2 having to reload the page. Another way to wrap your head around this type of interaction is to think of a chat room. If the chat were hosted in a web application, it would use Pub/Sub to push those changes around. On the Server side of things, there are two main pieces for ActionCable. First, there are Connections, which when a WebSocket is accepted from the client, the server creates a Connection object. The Connection object’s main focus is going to be and . Authentication Authorization On the other hand, Channels are the workhorse of the Server-Side components. Channel’s will be the logical separation of business in the Rails WebSocket world. Once added, an end user can be subscribed to a channel to receive events based on each channel. On the Client-side of the world, there is a Consumer. This consumer will allow the browser to create a subscription to any of the Channel’s built. There is also the idea that you can call subscribe on the same channel multiple times. This approach is useful if you need to subscribe to numerous instances of a model, for example, multiple individual `Standups` on the page. This becomes apparent when you involve the Channel’s method. Where the first argument is the string that will match what a later broadcast will publish too. Also, Rails and ActionCable come with a better helper method if you are working directly with model and objects. This will handle serialization of object ids. stream_from stream_for Lastly, as far as ActionCable pieces go, to complete the roundtrip is . A is merely the mechanism to publish events back to channels in which there is a subscription. Broadcasts Broadcast When it comes to configuration, ActionCable is much like most other Rails libraries and doesn’t need much. Like a database, you can tell ActionCable what type of adapter to use. The adapter choices are async(inline, used for development or testing), Redis(used for production) or PostgreSQL(does not seem very prevalent in the ActionCable use case). ActionCable also allows you to whitelist the URL origin’s from which can connect via WebSockets to ActionCable. You’ll want to set this up when you go live with ActionCable in production to make sure that the WebSocket(ws:// by the way) are coming from the URL your application is using. Using ActionCable in your application Let’s get hypothetical for a second here. Let’s suppose you are building a Project Management application. For brevity, also let’s assume you are only concerned with edit’s to the Projects high level information and a notification dropdown. A few more assumptions to be made are that you plan on using Redis, Puma to pass connections through the main Rails server, Sidekiq, and finally that Devise is being used for authentication. ws:// Let’s get started with some general configuration. The first thing you can do is added the ActionCable meta tags to your application layout in the section: head = action_cable_meta_tag Next, add the following line, to mount ActionCable, to your : config/application.rb config.action_cable.mount_path = '/websocket' If you want to see ActionCable work in your development server, you will need to adjust your : config/cable.yml development:adapter: redisurl: redis://127.0.0.1:6379/1 If this change is made, you will not be able to pass broadcasts between different processes. Rails uses their class to handle authorizing and authentication. In the case of using Devise, there is a variable to access and use for authentication. Update : Connection app/channels/application_cable/connection.rb module ApplicationCableclass Connection < ActionCable::Connection::Baseidentified_by :current_user def connectself.current_user = find_verified_userlogger.add_tags 'ActionCable', current_user.idend protected def find_verified_userif (verified_user = env['warden'].user)verified_userelsereject_unauthorized_connectionendendendend Lastly, in most recent version of Rails, there should be premade file: cables.js (function() {this.App || (this.App = {}); App.cable = ActionCable.createConsumer(); }).call(this); This will create an App object for your Rails javascript to use and add the ActionCable consumer library. With that out of the way, we can begin with ActionCable based updates to existing Standups when someone edits their standup! In practice, adding ActionCable functionality comes down to a few main parts: A channel in `app/channels` to handle the streaming setup logic from the backend. This means you are making a subscription available from the server to connections from a browser. A javascript/CoffeeScript file in `app/assets/javascripts/channe`\linebreak`ls` that will `subscribe` to streams on the server side. Optional: A service Object to coordinate calls to possibly many background jobs to handle an ActionCable Broadcast. An ActiveJob job that will gather any more needed data render a partial and send partial in the broadcast. A partial that will be the correct amount of markup that will be pushed to the browser via an ActionCable broadcast. The javascript/CoffeeScript file from before will need a `received` function to handle the incoming data(HTML) and place it on the page where it needs to go. That list may seem daunting, but I am sure we can make our way through it easily. Let’s start by adding our first channel: class ProjectsChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel def follow(data)stream_from "projects:#{data['project_id']}"end def unfollowstop_all_streamsendend Here, we are setting up methods that will be invoked from javascript ActionCable functions. When called, they will set up streams that will broadcast back changes, if the browser is subscribed. With a few mentions of the javascript file while explaining the Channel, it is now time to show you the corresponding javascript file for this channel: $(document).on('turbolinks:load', function() {if (App.projects) {return App.projects.followVisibleprojects();}}); App.projects = App.cable.subscriptions.create("projectsChannel", {collection: function() {return $('.project-box');},connected: function() {return setTimeout((function(_this) {return function() {return _this.followVisibleprojects();};})(this), 1000);},followVisibleprojects: function() {var i, len, results, project, projects;projects = this.collection().map(function() {return $(this).attr('data-project');}).get();if (projects.length > 0) {results = [];for (i = 0, len = projects.length; i < len; i++) {project = projects[i];results.push(this.perform('follow', {project_id: project}));}return results;} else {return this.perform('unfollow');}},disconnected: function() {return this.perform('unfollow');},received: function(data) {var box;console.log("[ActionCable] [project] [" + data.id + "]", data);box = $(".project-box[data-project='" + data.id + "']");if (box) {return box.find('.box-body').first().replaceWith(data.html);}}}); Here, there are a few moving pieces. First, let’s assume you have added a data-project HTML attribute to each surrounding to the main content you have. They will be collected to be iterated over and send subscriptions to the previous channel with each of the project’s IDs. Additionally, as the projects watched will be dynamic based on the page the end user is visiting, we use a Turbolinks event to refresh the streamed list on every page load. You will see later, the function will allow incoming rendered HTML passed back to the browser to be inserted in a project’s . div received div You’ll want to make sure that your project’s index page is set up to use partials: - projects.each do |project|= render partial: 'projects/project', locals: {project: project} This way, the Project’s can be rendered individually later in a ActiveJob task and pushed to the browser, to replace the current content. The partial wi’ll just be the single item’s representation of the markup. Think of a template boiled down to just the object’s markup. show Next, you will want to update your controller to invoke some sort of ActionCables side effect after updating the project. In my opinion, this is a great place for a service object to orchastrate the needed changes after the update(or create later) are finished: ...def updateif .update(project_params)invoke_cablesredirect_back(fallback_location: root_path,notice: 'Project was successfully updated.')endend... @project private ... def invoke_cablesCableServices::NotifyJobsService.(project: ,action: action_name.to_sym,user: current_user)endend @project If the project updates successfully, a service object is called with the project, action taken(controller action_name) and current_user. Let’s jump into that service, : app/services/cable_services/notify_jobs_service.rb module CableServicesclass NotifyJobsServiceattr_reader :project, :action, :user def initialize(params) = params[:project] = params[:action] = params[:user]end @project @action @user def self.call(params)new(params).send(:perform)end private def performif action == :updateCables::ProjectItemDomJob.perform_later(project)endendendend Right now the Service is simply instantiating an object and passing it to a background job at : app/job/cables/project_item_dom_job.rb module Cablesclass ProjectItemDomJob < ApplicationJobdef perform(project)ActionCable.server.broadcast("projects:#{project.id}",id: project.id,html: render_project(project))end private def render_project(project)ApplicationController.render(partial: 'projects/project',locals: { project: project })endendend Pretty simple background job we have here. We’re firing off a re-rendered version of that particular project’s partial, via an ActionCable Brodcast. The first argument in a broadcast like this is the string representation of the subscribed channels from the browser. Which, now brings us back to the function, which will insert the new HTML into the page. received received: function(data) {var box;console.log("[ActionCable] [project] [" + data.id + "]", data);box = $(".project-box[data-project='" + data.id + "']");if (box) {return box.find('.box-body').first().replaceWith(data.html);}} Handling Notifications via ActionCable: Unlike the first example of ActionCable interactions, this one will not be based on a specific page. This provides a few more liberties when subscribing and streaming. For brevity here, let’s assume there is already some sort of notification dropdown or area, that prefills information based on a query of the last n number of projects. First, the channel can use to stream against a specific model object, and in this case, the current user: stream_for class WebNotificationsChannel < ApplicationCable::Channeldef subscribedstream_for current_userend def unsubscribedstop_all_streamsendend Additionally, the method is used as it is actually fired without any special invocation as soon as a javascript subscription is created from the browser. subscribed You will also notice a much smaller subscription javascript file: App.cable.subscriptions.create("WebNotificationsChannel", {box: function() {return $('#notification-container');},disconnected: function() {return this.perform('unfollow');},received: function(data) {console.log("[ActionCable] [Notification]", data);return this.box().first().html(data.html);}}); This file is mainly to capture the containing , HTML replacement logic and some general subscription cleanup. div Yow now jump back to the service object created earlier to add a new background job invocation: ... def performif action == :updateCables::ProjectItemDomJob.perform_later(standup)elseCables::ProjectNotificationJob.perform_later(user)endend ... With only two action types right now, you can use a simple if statement to switch on which jobs should be fire. If you were handling deletes as well, you would probably want to use a statement. Her’e that new : case Cables::ProjectNotificationJob module Cablesclass ProjectNotificationJob < ApplicationJobinclude ProjectsHelper def perform(user)users = user.teams.flat_map(&:users)users.each do |notification_user|WebNotificationsChannel.broadcast_to(notification_user,html: render_project(notification_user))endend private def render_project(user)ApplicationController.render(partial: 'layouts/navigation/notifications',locals: { notification_projects: notification_projects(user) })endendend A few more assumptions are made here, such as that user’s belong to one or more teams, and you have a way to fetch a collection of projects through the method located in . This way the logic could be shared with a template and this job, through an . Otherwise, this job is very similar to the other in this post. notification_projects ProjectsHelper include There is one more important difference, the broadcast is being invoked by `WebNotificationsChannel` and a `broadcast_to` method. This allows you to pass in an object instead of building a string yourself. This is much like the Channel passing in an object in `stream_for`. Testing ActionCable Last, but not least, we will want to test the ActionCable behavior added in this post. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the Rails core team has not added a comprehensive testing class for ActionCable. Thus, their recommended approach is to use behavior testing. In the case of RSpec and this post, it means we will add some feature tests to cover this behavior. To round out our testing, we will add job specs to test the jobs in depth, on a unit level. One small piece of configuration is needed before getting started with the feature specs. To test ActionCable through the browser, the default feature spec rails server(WebBrick) will not work. Thus, we will add a config setting to tell Capybara to use Puma on demand. Before the end of the Rspec configuration in : spec/rails_helper.rb config.before(:each, puma: true) doCapybara.server = :pumaend This block switches the Capybara server when is added to a spec in the same fashion as . puma: true js: true Now, let’s start with the edit feature spec, to go over some helpful approaches to feature spec’n ActionCable: require 'rails_helper' RSpec.feature 'ActionCable Edit Project', type: :feature dologin_user before(:each) do = FactoryGirl.create(:team) = [FactoryGirl.create(:project,user_id: ser.id)]end @team @projects @u it 'should see project edit via ActionCable', js: true, puma: true dovisit projects_path project_text = 'Oh yeah!' expect(page).not_to have_content(project_text) # submit form in new windownew_window = open_new_windowwithin_window new_window dovisit edit_project_path( .first)first('.edit_project .box .links a').clickfind('.edit_project .box .nested-fields input.form-control.input-lg').set project_textclick_on 'Save'end @projects expect doswitch_to_window(windows.first)page.to have_text(project_text)end visit root_pathend end The gist of this spec is that, a project is created, available on an index page. Using Capybara’s window management, a new window is opened up to edit the existing project. Finally, after switching back to the first window, see that ActionCable had updated the page without reloading. The final makes sure the disconnect logic is run and accounted for. visit root_path Behavior testing the notification is practically the same thing and is left as an exercise to the user. In addition to testing the browser behavior, we can also test the job functions as we expect and renders out a partial to be sent back to the browser: Now, let's start with the edit feature spec: ```rubyrequire 'rails_helper'include ActiveJob::TestHelper RSpec.describe Cables::ProjectItemDomJob dobefore(:each) do = FactoryGirl.create(:user) = FactoryGirl.create(:team,user_ids: [ .id]) = FactoryGirl.create(:project,user_id: .id)end @user @team @user @project @user it 'matches with enqueued job' doActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter = :testCables::ProjectItemDomJob.perform_laterexpect(Cables::ProjectItemDomJob).to have_been_enqueuedend it 'enqueues a default based job' doActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter = :testexpect {  Cables::ProjectItemDomJob.perform_later( ) }.to have_enqueued_job.on_queue('default')end @project it 'renders a partial' doexpect(ApplicationController).to receive(:render)Cables::ProjectItemDomJob.perform_now( )endend``` @project Here the job is being tested to make sure it is enqueued, enqueued to the right queue and receives a call to render a partial. Hopefully this post helpers understand ActionCable a little bit more than a quick set of chat functions and methods. Be sure to comment on unique uses you have found for ActionCable!

The Practical Guide to Using ActionCable

This is part 11 of an N part series detailing how I make . my animations Prev Next So you’ve made a but how do you show it off? data visualisation To do that we need to output the to some sort of video file and then find some site willing to host it. animation I found Processing’s default video creation somewhat underwhelming so I used a slightly more tricky but far superior technique. You will need to download two things, a video creation tool called and a library that plugs into which uses that called . ffmpeg Processing Video Export First download from f . I use windows so merely unzip it somewhere (I have a folder called for such things where I unzipped it and renamed the folder to . Put into the user path — I use for this — and you’re good to go). ffmpeg fmpeg.org c:\tools\ ffmpeg c:\tools\ffmpeg\bin eveditor.com Now install by running and open the by going to the menu. Select the tab and search for . Click install and you’re done. There’s more info on . Video Export Processing Contribution Manager Tools/Add Tool... Libraries Video Export funprogramming.org To use you first need to import it into your sketch so add these lines to the top of the file: Video Export import com.hamoid.*;VideoExport videoExport; is the github user id of the developer (check out his ) so I guess he named all the libraries with that as a prefix. The second line defines a variable called of the type . Looks confusing until you get used to it. hamoid github account videoExport VideoExport Next thing we need to do is tell about our sketch so in add the following: Video Export setup() videoExport = new VideoExport(this);videoExport.setFrameRate(30);videoExport.startMovie(); creates an instance of the type providing the current sketch denoted by so that it can access the frames. new VideoExport(this); VideoExport this We are now ready to save individual frames to the video so at the end of add: draw() videoExport.saveFrame(); It is important to execute when the animation finishes as the video file may get corrupted, if the video doesn’t play then check that this command is executed. videoExport.endMovie() This creates a video file called in your sketch folder which you can play in your favorite video player. processing-movie.mp4 On your first run of a sketch using a window will show asking for where you installed Video Export ffmpeg. Check the end of the post to see the full source code of the Keeling animation including the commands. Video Export So now how do you create a gif? By using of course! ffmpeg You can simply open a dos prompt¹ or terminal and execute: ffmpeg -i processing-movie.mp4 processing-movie.gif This will work most of the time but if you create a video with more than 256 colours you’ll find the quality drops considerably in which case things get a tad more tricky. In this case you need to execute two commands. First is to find out all the colours used in your video and then create the gif using that palette by using these two commands: ffmpeg ffmpeg -i processing-movie.mp4 -vf "palettegen" -y palette.pngffmpeg -i processing-movie.mp4 -i palette.png -lavfi "fps=50,paletteuse" -y out.gif For the full gory details read . I turned the above into a batch script file called : pkh’s blog makegif.bat ffmpeg -i %1 -vf "palettegen" -y palette.pngffmpeg -i %1 -i palette.png -lavfi "fps=50,paletteuse" -y out.gif Simply executed by and it creates a gif called . makegif processing-movie.mp4 out.gif Now we have an and a file! What do we do with it? We need to host it somewhere so it can be shared. So here are your options: mp4 gif : Simply attach your file to a tweet. If it’s longer than a certain amount a trimming dialog appears but if you move the start and stop indicators to the beginning and end of the video twitter will happily host it. Twitter mp4 : Upload and go, can add music from YouTube’s free music library, which is nice. YouTube Simply attach your to a post. FaceBook: mp4 (Pronounced “imager” apparently) is a perfect place to host gifs so you can then post to sites like ², add the link to emails or perhaps write stories on some site called medium.com. I find that sharing with the imgur community is highly worthwhile too. When hosting there you can either link to the gif directly or to a faster loading simply by adding a to the end of the URL. imgur.com : reddit.com gifv v Here’s the complete source code of the Keeling animation using : Video Export import com.hamoid.*;VideoExport videoExport; import java.time.*;import de.looksgood.ani.*;Ani _ani; FloatDict _data = new FloatDict();LocalDate _startDate = LocalDate.of(1958, 3, 29); void setup(){loadData();size(500,500);background(0);stroke(255,255,0);textAlign(CENTER); Ani.init(this);Ani.setDefaultTimeMode(Ani.FRAMES);_ani = new Ani(this, 530, "_change", 6, Ani.EXPO_IN); videoExport = new VideoExport(this);videoExport.setFrameRate(30);videoExport.startMovie();} float yScale = 20.0; boolean _coda = false;int _codaCount = 0; float _change = 1.0;final int MARGIN = 60;final float CO2MIN = 313.04; void draw(){if(_change >= 6.0){if(!_coda){_coda = true;_codaCount = frameCount;}if(frameCount - _codaCount > 120){videoExport.endMovie();exit();}videoExport.saveFrame();return;} background(0);strokeWeight(1); line(MARGIN, 0, MARGIN, height);line(0, height - MARGIN, width, height - MARGIN); drawGraph(MARGIN, height - MARGIN, width - MARGIN, height - MARGIN);videoExport.saveFrame();} void drawGraph(int xPos, int yPos, int graphWidth, int graphHeight){text("Atmospheric CO₂ concentration 1958 - 2017\nR. F. Keeling, S. J. Walker, S. C. Piper and A. F. Bollenbacher\nMauna Loa, Observatory, Hawaii", MARGIN + graphWidth / 2.0, MARGIN);int deltaX = int(frameCount * _change); float xScale = 1.0; int xAxisMaximum = graphWidth; if(deltaX > graphWidth){xAxisMaximum = deltaX;xScale = float(graphWidth) / float(deltaX);} text("Year", MARGIN + graphWidth / 2, height - 20);drawXAxis(xAxisMaximum, xScale); strokeWeight(3); float co2Max = 0.0; for(int dataIndex = 1; dataIndex <= deltaX; dataIndex++){ int daysFromStart = (dataIndex - 1) \* 7;  
LocalDate frameDate = \_startDate.plusDays(daysFromStart);  
     
  
if(\_data.hasKey(frameDate.toString()))  
{  
  float co2 = \_data.get(frameDate.toString());  
    
  if(co2 > co2Max) co2Max = co2;  
          
  float x = dataIndex;  
  float y = (co2 - CO2MIN);  
    
  if(y \* yScale > graphHeight)   
  {  
    yScale = float(graphHeight)/y;  
  }  
    
  point(xPos + x \* xScale, yPos - (y \* yScale));  
} } if((co2Max - CO2MIN) * yScale < graphHeight)co2Max = graphHeight / yScale + CO2MIN; pushMatrix();translate(0, graphWidth / 2);rotate(-PI / 2.0);text("CO₂ concentration (PPM)", 0, 20);popMatrix(); drawYAxis(co2Max, yScale);} void drawYAxis(float co2Max, float yScale){float co2Tick = 320.0;strokeWeight(1); while(co2Tick <= co2Max){float yAxisTickPos = height - MARGIN - (co2Tick - CO2MIN) * yScale; line(MARGIN, yAxisTickPos, MARGIN - 5.0, yAxisTickPos);  
text(int(co2Tick), MARGIN - 15, yAxisTickPos+3);  
  
co2Tick += 10.0; }} void drawXAxis(int xAxisMaximum, float xScale){int yPos = height - MARGIN;float xAxisTick = 279.0 / 7.0;int axisYear = 1959; while(xAxisTick <= xAxisMaximum){int tickLength = 5;int xPos = MARGIN + int(xAxisTick * xScale); if(axisYear % 5 == 0)  
{  
  text(axisYear, xPos, yPos + 22);  
  tickLength = 10;  
}  
      
line(xPos, yPos, xPos, yPos + tickLength);  
  
xAxisTick += 365.25 / 7.0;  
axisYear++; }} void loadData(){String[] lines = loadStrings("weekly_in_situ_co2_mlo.csv"); for (String line : lines){if( line.startsWith("\"") ) continue; String\[\] values = split(line, ',');  
String date = values\[0\];  
float co2 = parseFloat(values\[1\]);  
\_data.set(date, co2); }} To thank you for getting this far here’s a dog wanting more peanut butter ( ): source Yes, this is blatant click-bait. ¹ Tip for windows users is to open Windows Explorer to the location you want, press and replace the contents of the text box with and press enter. This opens a dos prompt for this directory. F4 cmd ² Best places on reddit.com are , , and . r/dataisbeautiful r/visualization r/climate

Putting it out there

“Building V8 is not for the faint of heart “ — someone on the internet Sometimes I wonder where my insatiable hunger for JavaScript knowledge will lead me to. This time I decided to learn how V8 is used by a browser and Node and where the API we use daily comes from. So I set out to investigate the integration between V8 and two most popular hosting environment for myself. My plan was to build a simple application that embeds V8. And since not many web developers know that event loop is implemented by V8 but by a hosting environment I wanted to demonstrate this in my app. I also hoped to learn about V8 inner workings along the way. not But first I had to build V8 from sources and embed it into a simple HelloWorld application. The task turned out to be not for the faint-of-heart. I spent about a week googling and learning about many thing related to C++ and python. I had to ask four heavily downvoted questions on stackoverflow. I’m going to keep them as a remainder of the efforts it took me to build the thing. Since both building and embedding are not trivial this article consists of two parts. The first one shows how to build V8 from the sources on Windows machine. The second part explains what is required to plug it into your application. Currently V8 can only be built on x64 machines so make sure you’re building on Windows x64 version. Please recommend this article 💚 so that others know there is a simpler way to build V8. I really hope this article will save some curious mind much pains. Setting up environment The instructions on how to build V8 are available but unfortunately they assume you already have a working environment and omit many details. But these details is exactly what makes building V8 tricky. here V8 uses part of a toolchain for Chromium project, so some of the information found also was helpful to me. Please note that you don’t need to fetch and build Chromium sources to build V8. Only part of the tool chain like depot_tools is required. here Git V8 uses as a VCS so and install it. GIT download VS 2015 Building V8 on Windows requires building tools that come with Visual Studio. As of December 8, 2016 Chromium requires Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 with the 14393 Windows SDK. So go ahead and download the installer for Visual Studio Community 2015 with Update 3 . This page requires membership, but it’s free, so no worries here. Now run the installer and make sure to select the following: here After the install finished, check that the installer has installed Debug Interface Access (DIA) SDK and vcvarsall.bat to the following directories: …\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\ DIA SDK …\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\ vcvarsall.bat For some reason these may be missing after the install. If that’s the case, you’ll have to figure and somehow get them installed. Otherwise, you won’t be able to build. In my case it installed correctly on one machine were missing on the other. why Windows SDK Since Chromium uses Debugging Tools For Windows which are not installed as part of VS installation, you’ll also need to install Windows SDK separately. Download the installer and install. Make sure you’ve selected the package in the installer: here Depot tools the depot_tools bundle and extract it somewhere. Download use drag-n-drop or copy-n-paste extract from Explorer, this will not extract the hidden “.git” folder which is necessary for depot_tools to autoupdate itself. You can use “Extract all…” from the context menu though. Warning: DO NOT Environment variables Add depot_tools to the start of your PATH. Many build python scripts are written for Python version lower than 3.x so ensure it’s ahead of any installs of Python. Assuming you unzipped the bundle to E:\V8\depot_tools update path like that: I also recommend to add it to the system variables PATH not user variables. The PATH is constructed from the system path, which can be viewed in the System Environment Variables field in the System dialog box. The User path is appended to the system path**. It means if you add path to User variables, and you have other Python installation found from the system path, you’ll have a problem.** You’ll also need to specify two environment variables: DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0 GYP_MSVS_VERSION =2015 Update Depot tools From a cmd.exe shell, run the command gclient (without arguments). On first run, gclient will install all the Windows-specific bits needed to work with the code, including msysgit and python. If you run gclient from a non-cmd shell (e.g., cygwin, PowerShell), it may appear to run properly, but msysgit, python, and other tools may not get installed correctly. If you see strange errors with the file system on the first run of gclient, you may want to . disable Windows Indexing After running gclient open a command prompt and type where python and confirm that the depot_tools python.bat comes ahead of any copies of python.exe. Get source code Go into the directory where you want to download the V8 source into and execute the following in your terminal/shell: fetch v8
cd v8 Building V8 Now that we have environment ready we can build V8. All commands should be executed using Windows Command Shell inside the V8 source directory. We will be executing python scripts as part of the build process and we need to ensure that the python executable from build_tools is used. The problem is that Windows can associate python files with other versions of python installed on your PC, so always execute command in the following syntax: python path/to/script params not this path/to/script params Start with the downloading of all build dependencies by executing the following: gclient sync Then generate the necessary build files by running the following: python tools/dev/v8gen.py x64.release To embed V8 into our application we need to build it as a static library. To do that, we need to modify default build configuration and add these two flags to args.gn file: is_component_build = false
v8_static_library = true Run the following to open the file ..\out.gn\x64.release\args.gn in an editor: gn out.gn\x64.release Add the lines so the resulting file looks like this: is_debug = false
target_cpu = “x64”
is_component_build = false
v8_static_library = true The last thing is to compile the source by executing the following: ninja -C out.gn/x64.release Run tests to verify that everything is built correctly: tools/run-tests.py --gn Build result The build generates ..\v8source\out.gn\x64.release\obj folder with many (*.lib) : v8_base.lib, v8_libbase.lib etc. We will use these files when embedding v8 into our application. static library files Embedding V8 into a custom application As it turned out, the struggle didn’t end with a successful build. I also jumped over multiple hoops when trying to embed V8 and build sample Hello world application. is pretty short and it’s for Linux based systems and again is lacking on many important details. The manual We will embed V8 into a simple console application. Create an application by following the instructions described (don’t check Empty project) or . This creates Win32 application but the V8 is built for x64 architecture so we need to modify our project a bit. To do that, go to project properties and select x64 active solution platform: here here Also, by default V8 is built in release mode. To avoid mismatch errors like , we need to set the project to release configuration: this Also, we need to make the application to use the multithread, static version of the run-time library: Configure include and library directories Next, we need to add folders to look for V8 header files to : Include Directories And add folders with V8 static library files to : Library Directories nicely summarizes all types of directories. This page Compose HelloWorld cpp file Now, copy the HelloWorld example from to your main cpp file and include stdafx as the top include in your file: here #include “stdafx.h” Link static libraries We’re almost done. As mentioned earlier the V8 itself is comprised of static library files in the ..\v8source\out.gn\x64.release\obj directory. Now we need to link those libraries. To do that add the following to your code: #pragma comment(lib, "v8_base.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "v8_libbase")
#pragma comment(lib, "v8_external_snapshot")
#pragma comment(lib, "v8_libplatform")
#pragma comment(lib, "v8_libsampler")
#pragma comment(lib, "icuuc.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "icui18n.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "inspector") And also link Windows related libraries required by V8 libraries: #pragma comment(lib, "winmm.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "dbghelp.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "shlwapi.lib") Build the application And now finally we’re ready build. Go to Build->Build solution or press Ctrl+Shift+B. This will generate an executable file to the following location: ..\project-folder\x64\Release\project-name.exe A few more bits V8 requires two files located in …\v8-source\out.gn\x64.release for a startup: snapshot_blob.bin natives_blob.bin Copy them to where the executable is. That’s it. You can now run your executable from the command line and it should output “Hello World”. Did you find the information in the article helpful?

How to build V8 on Windows and not go mad

Writing a Blog Engine in Phoenix and Elixir: Part 4, Adding Roles to our Controllers

Next.js 13 app router feature plus server and client side components to some extent brought changes on how we approach integration and state management using redux toolkit. This tutorial is meant to take you through how to add and use redux toolkit in your next.js 13 projects. We will go through a real world example whereby, we need to store authentication data in redux state and in this case it will be persisted. We will also access this data in the some of the components that need it. Assumptions You are comfortable writing react functional components using Typescript. You are familiar with redux toolkit - creating slices and reducer functions You are familiar with Next.js 13 app router You are familiar with the node.js package managers, I am using yarn in this case. If you are a complete beginner in next.js or redux toolkit, this tutorial may not be suitable for you, but i have provided all the code to follow along. Requirements A backend API with login and logout endpoint. To simplify things, i have a simple nest.js backend with a simulation of login and logout functionality in repo. Clone it, run to install packages , and then run . Your are good to go. this yarn yarn run start:dev You also need a next.js13 app, created using the . Again all the code for this tutorial can be found in repo to follow along. npx create-next-app@latest this Let’s get started Here is the file structure of the project. Using the app router feature of next.js 13. Create a Redux Store We need some packages. These are  @reduxjs/toolkit and react-redux. However, i added redux-persist and redux-logger. Only redux-logger is optional, the other three are required for the rest of the tutorial. yarn add @reduxjs/toolkit react-redux redux-persist redux-logger After installing the packages let us dive into creating the store. app/store/index.ts import { combineReducers, configureStore } from "@reduxjs/toolkit";
import { useDispatch, TypedUseSelectorHook, useSelector } from "react-redux";
import { persistReducer } from "redux-persist";
// import storage from "redux-persist/lib/storage";
import { authReducer } from "./slices/authSlice";
import storage from "./customStorage";
import logger from "redux-logger";

const authPersistConfig = {
  key: "auth",
  storage: storage,
  whitelist: ["isAuth", "jid"],
};

const rootReducer = combineReducers({
  auth: persistReducer(authPersistConfig, authReducer),
});

export const store = configureStore({
  reducer: rootReducer,
  middleware: (getDefaultMiddleware) =>
    getDefaultMiddleware({ serializableCheck: false }).concat(logger),
});

export type RootState = ReturnType<typeof store.getState>;
export type AppDispatch = typeof store.dispatch;

export const useAppDispatch = () => useDispatch<AppDispatch>();
export const useAppSelector: TypedUseSelectorHook<RootState> = useSelector; The code above is responsible for creating the redux store for us. Notice the authPersistConfig definition. This code directs the redux store to persist auth data but only the isAuth and jid keys specified in the whitelist array. Also note the storage am using, its not directly from redux-persist. I have a custom implementation that will take care of execution of the code in client and server side. Using the storage directly from redux-persist results to an error in the server side. Below is the customStorage implementation. Inspiration from github thread. this app/store/customStorage.ts "use client";

import createWebStorage from "redux-persist/lib/storage/createWebStorage";

const createNoopStorage = () => {
  return {
    getItem(_key: any) {
      return Promise.resolve(null);
    },
    setItem(_key: any, value: any) {
      return Promise.resolve(value);
    },
    removeItem(_key: any) {
      return Promise.resolve();
    },
  };
};

const storage =
  typeof window !== "undefined"
    ? createWebStorage("local")
    : createNoopStorage();

export default storage; Notice that in the storage definition am creating a dummy store since its impossible to create local storage in the server side.  By checking existence of the window object i can choose when to create the storage. Next, we create an authSlice. app/store/slices/authSlice.ts import { createSlice } from "@reduxjs/toolkit";
import type { PayloadAction } from "@reduxjs/toolkit";

export interface IAuthState {
  isAuth: boolean;
  jid: string;
}

const initialState: IAuthState = {
  isAuth: false,
  jid: "",
};

export const authSlice = createSlice({
  name: "auth",
  initialState,
  reducers: {
    setAuth: (state, action: PayloadAction<boolean>) => {
      state.isAuth = action.payload;
    },
    setJid: (state, action: PayloadAction<string>) => {
      state.jid = action.payload;
    },
  },
});

// Action creators are generated for each case reducer function
export const { setAuth, setJid } = authSlice.actions;

export const authReducer = authSlice.reducer; Here we get the actions and reducer to play around with the auth state. Notice the two keys and . These are the ones we persisted in the store. isAuth jid Last, we need a way to consume the state in our components. Typically, in previous versions of nextjs we could add the provider in the _app.(jsx/tsx) file. In next.js 13 however, with server components being the default for all pages, it can be challenging to have the provider in the root of the app as it is meant to work on the client. This means we have to initialize the provider separately and wrap it only on client side components that need access to the store. app/store/ReduxProvider.tsx import { Provider } from "react-redux";
import { store } from ".";
import { persistStore } from "redux-persist";

persistStore(store); // persist the store

export default function ReduxProvider({
  children,
}: {
  children: React.ReactNode;
}) {
  return <Provider store={store}>{children}</Provider>;
} The code above creates the provider for us. Notice the persistStore line of code. Since we need to persist a section of the state, we need this line before supplying the store to the Provider. With the provider in place we can move it to client components that need access to the the store. Create the Next.js 13 Pages We will look into three pages which are essential to test the functionality we want. ie Home,Login and Account pages. On running the client app,and visiting you will see this simple home page.  Nothing fancy, just a navbar and text http://localhost:3000 Here is the home page code. app/(navbar)/page.tsx export default function Home() {
  return (
    <div className="p-5">
      <h3>Home</h3>
    </div>
  );
} Here is the login page code. app/(navbar)/login/page.tsx import ClientLoginFormWrapper from "./ClientFormWrapper";

export default function Login() {
  return (
    <div className="h-screen w-full flex">
      <div className="m-auto">
        <h1 className="font-bold text-3xl">Login</h1>
        <br />
        <ClientLoginFormWrapper />
      </div>
    </div>
  );
} code. This is a client side component marked with the directive “use client“ at the top of the file. It has functionality that only works in the client side. Notice the <ReduxProvider/> wrapper. It will work in this case since it is in a client component. This allows us to have the redux store in the components it wraps. app/(navbar)/login/ClientFormWrapper.tsx "use client";

import ReduxProvider from "@/app/store/ReduxProvider";
import LoginForm from "./Form";

export default function ClientLoginFormWrapper() {
  return (
    <ReduxProvider>
      <LoginForm />
    </ReduxProvider>
  );
} this file has the login form code. Two html input fields and a submit button with both the onchange and onsubmit handlers. app/(navbar)/login/LoginForm.tsx "use client";

import { useAppDispatch } from "@/app/store";
import { setAuth, setJid } from "@/app/store/slices/authSlice";
import { useRouter } from "next/navigation";
import { useState } from "react";

// client side to add interactivity using local state
export default function LoginForm() {
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false);
  const [values, setValues] = useState({ username: "", password: "" });
  const router = useRouter();

  const dispatch = useAppDispatch();

  const handleChange = (e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => {
    const { name, value } = e.target;
    setValues({ ...values, [name]: value });
  };

  const handleSubmit = async (e: React.FormEvent<HTMLFormElement>) => {
    e.preventDefault();
    setLoading(true);
    try {
      const res = await fetch("http://localhost:3002/auth/login", {
        method: "POST",
        headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" },
        body: JSON.stringify(values),
        credentials: "include",
        mode: "cors",
      });
      const data = await res.json();
      if (!res.ok) throw new Error(data.message);
      dispatch(setJid(data.access_token));
      dispatch(setAuth(true));
      router.push("/account");
    } catch (err) {
      console.error(err);
    } finally {
      setLoading(false);
    }
  };

  return (
    <form onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
      <div>
        <div>
          <label htmlFor="username">Username</label>
        </div>
        <input
          name="username"
          id="username"
          type="text"
          className="w-full border-2 border-gray-900"
          onChange={handleChange}
          value={values.username}
        />
      </div>
      <br />
      <div>
        <div>
          <label htmlFor="password">Password</label>
        </div>
        <input
          name="password"
          type="password"
          className="w-full border-2 border-gray-900"
          onChange={handleChange}
          value={values.password}
        />
      </div>
      <br />
      <div>
        <button type="submit" className="bg-blue-700 p-2 text-white font-bold">
          Login
        </button>
      </div>
    </form>
  );
} Lets take a look at the onSubmit handler. The login endpoint returns a response object with an key. In this component note that i can access the redux store method since it is wrapped by the . I can therefore dispatch the token to the store where it is then persisted. Am also dispatching true value to update the state. After successful login, using the i redirect user to the page. access_token dispatch ReduxProvider isAuth router account With the nest.js backend above running, you can type any dummy username and password and this will take you to the account page. Here is the code. app/(navbar)/account/page.tsx import ClientStuff from "./ClientStuff";

export default function Account() {
  return (
    <div className="p-5">
      <ClientStuff />
    </div>
  );
} this is a client component that fetches user data from the backed and shows a welcome message. Notice we can use hooks in this component as it is client component. app/(navbar)/account/ClientStuff.tsx "use client";

import { store, useAppSelector } from "@/app/store";
import { useEffect, useState } from "react";

export default function ClientStuff() {
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(true);
  const [username, setUsername] = useState("");
  const jid = store.getState().auth.jid;

  useEffect(() => {
    const getData = async () => {
      try {
        const res = await fetch("http://localhost:3002/user/profile", {
          headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${jid}` },
          mode: "cors",
        });
        const data = await res.json();
        setUsername(data.sub);
        setLoading(false);
      } catch (error) {
        console.log(error);
      }
    };

    getData();
  }, [jid]);

  if (loading) return <div>Loading...</div>;

  return (
    <div>
      <h3 className="font-bold text-4xl">Welcome {username}!</h3>
    </div>
  );
} If the app router is still new to you, you might be a little confused by the file structure am using. Let’s discuss a few things about the app router feature. By default, all next.js 13 projects will have a pages folder with a file. This is how it looks like. It is a function component with , and tags. This is the root layout to be used with all the pages in your applications. layout.tsx children prop html body import './globals.css'
import type { Metadata } from 'next'
import { Inter } from 'next/font/google'

const inter = Inter({ subsets: ['latin'] })

export const metadata: Metadata = {
  title: 'Create Next App',
  description: 'Generated by create next app',
}

export default function RootLayout({
  children,
}: {
  children: React.ReactNode
}) {
  return (
    <html lang="en">
      <body className={inter.className}>{children}</body>
    </html>
  )
} Based on your design and requirements, you will make decisions on how you will layout your application. In this application, i needed a navbar that will be used in all pages. I therefore had to use a concept in next.js 13 called . For more information check out the . This enabled me to group all the pages that needed the navbar inside the folder without affecting the url. route groups docs (navbar) Here is the code in the layout in (navbar) folder. I called it NavLayout app/(navbar)/layout.tsx import MainNavbarClientWrapper from "./NavbarClientWrapper";

export default function NavLayout({ children }: { children: React.ReactNode }) {
  return (
    <main>
      <div className="w-full h-16 bg-black">
        <MainNavbarClientWrapper />
      </div>
      {children}
    </main>
  );
} With this layout all the pages in the folder will have the navbar. (navbar) app/(navbar)/NavbarClientWrapper.tsx "use client";

import ReduxProvider from "../store/ReduxProvider";
import MainNavbar from "./Navbar";

export default function MainNavbarClientWrapper() {
  return (
    <ReduxProvider>
      <MainNavbar />
    </ReduxProvider>
  );
} This is a client component, and hence am able to add the to wrap the component. ReduxProvider MainNavbar app/(navbar)/Navbar.tsx "use client";

import Link from "next/link";
import { MouseEvent, useEffect, useState } from "react";
import { useAppDispatch, useAppSelector } from "../store";
import { setAuth, setJid } from "../store/slices/authSlice";
import { usePathname, useRouter } from "next/navigation";


export default function MainNavbar() {
  const isAuth = useAppSelector((state) => state.auth.isAuth);
  const [isAuthenticated, setIsAuthenticated] = useState<boolean>();
  const dispatch = useAppDispatch();
  const pathname = usePathname();
  const router = useRouter();

  useEffect(() => {
    if (isAuth) {
      setIsAuthenticated(true);
    } else {
      setIsAuthenticated(false);
    }
  }, [isAuth]);

  const handleLogout = async (e: MouseEvent<HTMLButtonElement>) => {
    e.preventDefault();
    await fetch("http://localhost:3002/auth/logout", {
      credentials: "include",
      mode: "cors",
    });
    const inAuthPage = pathname.startsWith("/account");
    if (inAuthPage) {
      router.push("/login");
    }
    dispatch(setJid(""));
    dispatch(setAuth(false));
  };

  return (
    <nav className="flex content-between justify-between w-full h-full px-5 text-white">
      <div className="w-2/3 h-full flex">
        <Link href={"/"} className="my-auto font-bold text-4xl">
          Test App
        </Link>
      </div>

      <div className="flex justify-end w-1/3">
        {isAuthenticated && (
          <>
            <Link className="m-auto" href={"/account"}>
              Account
            </Link>
            <button onClick={handleLogout}>Logout</button>
          </>
        )}
        {isAuthenticated === false && (
          <div className="flex">
            <Link href={"/login"} className="m-auto">
              Login
            </Link>
          </div>
        )}
      </div>
    </nav>
  );
} In here, we have the logout handler which makes a request to server and blacklists the token. Then we can update the state by dispatching the and setters. With this functionality the user is logged out from the application. jid isAuth Final thoughts Redux remains to be a go to state manager in react apps development. Only by consuming it in client components that we can safely use it without interfering with the next.js server side functionality.

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