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• How to contribute to open source, for companies

  18 octobre 2010, par Dark Shikari — development, open source, x264

  I have seen many nigh-incomprehensible attempts by companies to contribute to open source projects, including x264. Developers are often simply boggled, wondering why the companies seem incapable of proper communication. The companies assume the developers are being unreceptive, while the developers assume the companies are being incompetent, idiotic, or malicious. Most of this seems to boil down to a basic lack of understanding of how open source works, resulting in a wide variety of misunderstandings. Accordingly, this post will cover the dos and don’ts of corporate contribution to open source.

  Do : contact the project using their preferred medium of communication.

  Most open source projects use public methods of communication, such as mailing lists and IRC. It’s not the end of the world if you mistakenly make contact with the wrong people or via the wrong medium, but be prepared to switch to the correct one once informed ! You may not be experienced using whatever form of communication the project uses, but if you refuse to communicate through proper channels, they will likely not be as inclined to assist you. Larger open source projects are often much like companies in that they have different parts to their organization with different roles. Don’t assume that everyone is a major developer !

  If you don’t know what to do, a good bet is often to just ask someone.

  Don’t : contact only one person.

  Open source projects are a communal effort. Major contributions are looked over by multiple developers and are often discussed by the community as a whole. Yet many companies tend to contact only a single person in lieu of dealing with the project proper. This has many flaws : to begin with, it forces a single developer (who isn’t paid by you) to act as your liaison, adding yet another layer between what you want and the people you want to talk to. Contribution to open source projects should not be a game of telephone.

  Of course, there are exceptions to this : sometimes a single developer is in charge of the entirety of some particular aspect of a project that you intend to contribute to, in which case this might not be so bad.

  Do : make clear exactly what it is you are contributing.

  Are you contributing code ? Development resources ? Money ? API documentation ? Make it as clear as possible, from the start ! How developers react, which developers get involved, and their expectations will depend heavily on what they think you are providing. Make sure their expectations match reality. Great confusion can result when they do not.

  This also applies in the reverse — if there’s something you need from the project, such as support or assistance with development of your patch, make that explicitly clear.

  Don’t : code dump.

  Code does not have intrinsic value : it is only useful as part of a working, living project. Most projects react very negatively to large “dumps” of code without associated human resources. That is, they expect you to work with them to finalize the code until it is ready to be committed. Of course, it’s better to work with the project from the start : this avoids the situation of writing 50,000 lines of code independently and then finding that half of it needs to be rewritten. Or, worse, writing an enormous amount of code only to find it completely unnecessary.

  Of course, the reverse option — keeping such code to yourself — is often even more costly, as it forces you to maintain the code instead of the official developers.

  Do : ignore trolls.

  As mentioned above, many projects use public communication methods — which, of course, allow anyone to communicate, by nature of being public. Not everyone on a project’s IRC or mailing list is necessarily qualified to officially represent the project. It is not too uncommon for a prospective corporate contributor to be turned off by the uninviting words of someone who isn’t even involved in the project due to assuming that they were. Make sure you’re dealing with the right people before making conclusions.

  Don’t : disappear.

  If you are going to try to be involved in a project, you need to stay in contact. We’ve had all too many companies who simply disappear after the initial introduction. Some tell us that we’ll need an NDA, then never provide it or send status updates. You may know why you’re not in contact — political issues at the company, product launch crunches, a nice vacation to the Bahamas — but we don’t ! If you disappear, we will assume that you gave up.

  Above all, don’t assume that being at a large successful company makes you immune to these problems. If anything, these problems seem to be the most common at the largest companies. I didn’t name any names in this post, but practically every single one of these rules has been violated at some point by companies looking to contribute to x264. In the larger scale of open source, these problems happen constantly. Don’t fall into the same traps that many other companies have.

  If you’re an open source developer reading this post, remember it next time you see a company acting seemingly nonsensically in an attempt to contribute : it’s quite possible they just don’t know what to do. And just because they’re doing it wrong doesn’t mean that it isn’t your responsibility to try to help them do it right.

• Find out what people are searching when coming from search engines

  7 novembre 2017, par InnoCraft — Plugins

  At InnoCraft, we know that SEO is an important topic for most of you. If you have not heard of this term before, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists in having your content website visible within the search result pages without paying for ads. SEO is also often referred as “natural” or “organic” traffic.

  In SEO, one of the most valuable data to analyze is the keyword used by the visitor to come to your website. Since 2011, major search engines decided to not disclose this data anymore, that’s the reason why you are seeing the “Keyword not defined” data within some of your Piwik reports, also called “not provided” :

  

  Keyword not defined in Piwik

  The solution

  As your keyword data is collected by search engines, each of them provides the searched keywords within different services such as :

  • Google Search Console
  • Bing/Yahoo Webmaster tools
  • Yandex Webmaster

  Those services allow website owners to see how many times their website appeared within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), how bots are crawling your pages, which search terms they used, and more. The drawback is, that they make take this data available only for a short period, you need to log in to all these services to get the insights you need and you cannot get aggregated overall keyword reports (over all search engines combined).

  The solution that gives you all this data in Piwik

  Would you like to know what the not defined search keywords in Piwik really are ? Would you like to combine keywords data from major search engines in one place ? Would you like to know how important your website is according to Google and Microsoft Bing and Yahoo ?

  At InnoCraft, the company behind Piwik, we created a plugin called “Search Engine Performance Keywords”. With this plugin, you will :

  1. be able to keep the search terms forever
  2. save time by crossing data from Google and Bing search within Piwik
  3. get an overview of how Google and Bing are crawling your site
  4. monitor search rankings and click-through rates for each keyword

  1 – Data ownership & data retention

  Once more, it is going back to Piwik roots. As Piwik is a Free software, you own the data you collect. Once the import is successful, you will be able to keep the keywords data as long as you wish. In the case of services such as Google Search Console, they will delete the data after 90 days !! Without our plugin you will not be able to analyze precisely how your SEO is doing month by month, year by year.

  2 – Save time by using a single interface

  Google and Bing have no interest in gathering data coming from various search engines… we do. As a result, with our plugin you can visualize the data coming from those two sources within a single report in order to analyze your SEO in a better way.
  You will not have to use spreadsheets anymore and no chance to miss some important keywords which you would maybe miss when you don’t aggregate them in a single report.

  

  3 – Crawl overview check

  Both Google and Bing have a crawl “budget”. This budget needs to be optimized in order for search engine bots to consider the most relevant pages. By gathering all the data within Piwik you will have a clear view of how well your website is appreciated by search engines :

  

  4 – Monitor search rankings

  The Search Engine Keywords Performance feature allows you to monitor search rankings for a given keyword and see his evolution :

  

  it also gives you the possibility to compare the performances of several keywords in order to see how your website is performing as a whole :

  

  How to get started ?

  The “Search Engine Keywords Performance” plugin has been developed by the InnoCraft team as a premium feature.

  Get Search Engine Keywords Performance on the Marketplace

  If you are not sure, note that InnoCraft is offering an unconditional and hassle-free 30-day money back guarantee period.

  Once you have installed the plugin, follow the guide in order to have it up and running.
  The installation process is not difficult in itself but takes some time as it requires to access to Google and Bing APIs.

  If you enjoyed this article, you may appreciate the following one about how to integrate ad services to Piwik : Make better online marketing decisions with the AOM plugin.

• A/B Testing Platform for Piwik Analytics

  10 novembre 2016, par InnoCraft — Plugins, Press Releases

  We are very excited to launch A/B Testing – a powerful new product designed to help you maximise your success and increase your conversions.

  What is A/B Testing and why is it so important ?

  Experimenting with A/B Testing is an important marketing strategy that goes a long way in maximising your conversions.

  With A/B Testing you can start improving your conversions and sales in your existing website or app by creating different versions of a web page or mobile app screen to find out how to modify your website to optimize business success.

  How does A/B Testing work ?

  To explain how A/B Testing works, let’s take an example. Imagine one of your most important landing pages has been redesigned to hopefully get more email signups. Now you need to make sure the new version is “better” than the current version, or at least does result in less conversions. To compare the performance of these two versions, you can then run an A/B test whereby the A/B testing product tells you whether the redesigned version is producing more email signups compared to the original version.

  How it works is that visitors on your website during the experiment will see a randomly chosen version (variation) and A/B Testing makes sure that your users will always see the same variation for all subsequent visits. The behaviour and goals converted by each user is measured continuously by Piwik A/B Testing. The beautifully designed and easy to use dashboard shows how each variation impacts your success metrics such as conversions, sales or page views.

  When the A/B test is complete, you will then know which is the winning version getting you closer to reaching your goals ! A/B Testing includes an advanced statistical analysis engine to provide a reliable indicator of which of your versions is actually improving your bottom line.

  Examples of successful A/B tests

  Below are a just a few interesting A/B tests results from the article 7 Dead-Simple A/B Tests You Should Run on Your Homepage (HubSpot).

  Increase click on CTA button by 21%

  

  We actually conducted an A/B test on button color and found that changing the CTA button from green to red increased clicks by 21%. In the world of website optimization, that’s huge !

  47.7% more clicks on the navigation bar

  

  An A/B test comparing the phrases used on the navigation bar discovered that the menu link “How It Works” earned 47.7% more clicks than “Why Use Us.”

  5% more conversions using a different image

  

  Highrise, a small business CRM, A/B tested their website’s imagery by featuring two different people – Jocelyn on the left, and Michael on the right. They found Michael helped improve conversions by almost 5%.

  Changing the headline to increase conversions by 38%

  

  WhichTestWon ran an A/B test on AwayFind’s homepage and found that Version B increased signups by 38%. This could be because the headline is more concise and the subheader includes bolded words to clearly communicate the product’s value

  Where do I start testing ?

  Your testing strategy is tied to your overall business strategy. What do you want people to achieve on your website ? What are the goals that you want your users to convert ? What are your one or two Key Performance Indicators, and what are your targets for these KPIs ?

  When you start thinking of improving your targets you can begin by looking at the most important parts that can be improved :

  • What are your call to actions ?
  • Which are your most popular pages, and landing pages ?
  • What elements of my website is above the fold and can be seen by all visitors within a few seconds ?

  How do I get A/B Testing ?

  All premium plugins come with our 14 day money back guarantee and 1-click installation & updates. Customers get all product updates for free.

  Learn more about A/B Testing Get it now on the Marketplace

  A/B Testing is available for purchase and download on the Marketplace.

  If you are not using Piwik yet, you can also signup for a free trial of Piwik Cloud (including A/B Testing !).

  Have a question about this product ? Get in touch.