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• Trouble with CoCCA Registry

  7 octobre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I’ve been rather despondent all week. People who see me daily could readily identify this fact. Unfortunately, the exact reason was difficult to adequately explain. The problems that nerds deal with…

  When A Domain Expires
  As a few people noticed, the multimedia.cx domain and all of it’s subdomains didn’t work this last week. The problem started on Monday, October 1. Whose fault ? Well, fundamentally, I neglected to renew the domain name in time. However, I prefer to place the blame on the .cx domain registrar, CoCCA Registry. You see, they have never developed the technology to email a domain holder with a notice that their domain is about to expire or has already expired.

  This domain is the only one I have ever held so I don’t have a lot of experience in this matter. I wondered if I was crazy for thinking it would be normal for a registrar to send an email or 2 with status updates about your domain. I get the impression from speaking with others that this is indeed normal. I have 3 different email addresses listed under my account at the registrar– 2 at multimedia.cx and a backup gmail account. I checked spam folders after this incident. Then I remembered that I have never received any email notifications from them (although password reset emails show up, so that part thankfully works). Also, their support emails are black holes.

  So, I guess the moral is : be wary of dealing with CoCCA Registry. However, they seem to be the only way to register domains under a wide variety of uncommon country codes.

  By Friday, the domain appeared to have been reinstated, even through the status was officially listed as “renewal-pending” according to the web-based management console. Eventually, as cached DNS results started to time out throughout the day, I started seeing subdomains come back. I excitedly used the ‘dig’ command to count down the seconds until gamemusic.multimedia.cx was accessible on the network I was on (the number after the domain name is the time-to-live or ‘TTL’ value) :

  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 3      IN      A       174.143.152.251
  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 2      IN      A       174.143.152.251
  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 1      IN      A       174.143.152.251
  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 12962  IN      A       207.45.186.114
  

  Finally, today (Saturday), I received a receipt confirming that the domain has been renewed.

  8 Years Old
  Incidentally, happy eighth birthday to multimedia.cx. It was September, 2004 when I decided to branch out from a simple ISP-based web presence.

  People often ask why I went with the .cx TLD. When I decided I wanted a proper domain name 8 years ago, I found that multimedia.X was already taken for just about every TLD value of X. .cx was a notable exception and was distinctive enough (speaking of .X, though, I see that multimedia.xxx is still up for grabs as of this writing ; I imagine that would come with a whole other set of problems).

  It’s funny that tech nerds often rail against outsourcing too much — email, storage, computing power, web hosting — all to some type of cloud provider under the premise that it could easily be taken away. But this episode teaches me that even having your own domain name is no guarantee of a solid online presence.

  Meanwhile, I have taken proactive steps to avert this same situation from arising again :

  
  
  

  Barring a lack of automated emails from the registrar, I hope a Google Calendar reminder set up a month ahead of expiration will do the trick.

• How can I render a video in real time with custom parameters ?

  18 décembre 2024, par Joaquín L. Robles

  Is it possible to render a video in real time with custom parameters ? I'm trying to inject some parameters (text, image and other video portions) into a video template depending on user parameters, like the "Facebook 10 Years video"..

  



  The output format should be any video format such as H.264.

  



  I've been googling and asking and the closest I got is to make a video from HTML5 canvas captures, which I think is totally inefficient.

  



  Any insight or guidance would be great, thanks

  


• Six Best Amplitude Alternatives

  10 décembre 2024, par Daniel Crough

  Product analytics is big business. Gone are the days when we could only guess what customers were doing with our products or services. Now, we can track, visualise, and analyse how they interact with them and, with that, constantly improve and optimise. 

  The problem is that many product analytics tools are expensive and complicated — especially for smaller businesses. They’re also packed with functionality more attuned to the needs of massive companies. 

  Amplitude is such a tool. It’s brilliant and it has all the bells and whistles that you’ll probably never need. Fortunately, there are alternatives. In this guide, we’ll explore the best of those alternatives and, along the way, provide the insight you’ll need to select the best analytics tool for your organisation. 

  Amplitude : a brief overview

  To set the stage, it makes sense to understand exactly what Amplitude offers. It’s a real-time data analytics tool for tracking user actions and gaining insight into engagement, retention, and revenue drivers. It helps you analyse that data and find answers to questions about what happened, why it happened, and what to do next.

  However, as good as Amplitude is, it has some significant disadvantages. While it does offer data export functionality, that seems deliberately restricted. It allows data exports for specific events, but it’s not possible to export complete data sets to manipulate or format in another tool. Even pulling it into a CSV file has a 10,000-row limit. There is an API, but not many third-party integration options.

  Getting data in can also be a problem. Amplitude requires manual tags on events that must be tracked for analysis, which can leave holes in the data if every possible subsequent action isn’t tagged. That’s a time-consuming exercise, and it’s made worse because those tags will have to be updated every time the website or app is updated. 

  As good as it is, it can also be overwhelming because it’s stacked with features that can create confusion for novice or inexperienced analysts. It’s also expensive. There is a freemium plan that limits functionality and events. Still, when an organisation wants to upgrade for additional functionality or to analyse more events, the step up to the paid plan is massive.

  Lastly, Amplitude has made some strides towards being a web analytics option, but it lacks some basic functionality that may frustrate people who are trying to see the full picture from web to app.

  Snapshot of Amplitude alternatives

  So, in place of Amplitude, what product analytics tools are available that won’t break the bank and still provide the functionality needed to improve your product ? The good news is that there are literally hundreds of alternatives, and we’ve picked out six of the best.

  1. Matomo – Best privacy-focused web and mobile analytics
  2. Mixpanel – Best for product analytics
  3. Google Analytics – Best free option
  4. Adobe Analytics – Best for predictive analytics
  5. Umami – Best lightweight tool for product analytics
  6. Heap – Best for automatic user data capture

  A more detailed analysis of the Amplitude alternatives

  Now, let’s dive deeper into each of the six Amplitude alternatives. We’ll cover standout features, integrations, pricing, use cases and community critiques. By the end, you’ll know which analytics tool can help optimise website and app performance to grow your business.

  1. Matomo – Best privacy-friendly web and app analytics

  Privacy is a big concern these days, especially for organisations with a presence in the European Union (EU). Unlike other analytics tools, Matomo ensures you comply with privacy laws and regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

  Matomo helps businesses get the insights they need without compromising user privacy. It’s also one of the few self-hosted tools, ensuring data never has to leave your site.

  Matomo is open-source, which is also rare in this class of tools. That means it’s available for anyone to adapt and customise as they wish. Everything you need to build custom APIs is there.

  

  Its most useful capabilities include visitor logs and session recordings to trace the entire customer journey, spot drop-off points, and fine-tune sales funnels. The platform also comes with heatmaps and A/B testing tools. Heatmaps provide a useful visual representation of your data, while A/B testing allows for more informed, data-driven decisions.

  Despite its range of features, many reviewers laud Matomo’s user interface for its simplicity and user-friendliness. 

  Why Matomo : Matomo is an excellent alternative because it fills in the gaps where Amplitude comes up short, like with cookieless tracking. Also, while Amplitude focuses mainly on behavioural analytics, Matomo offers both behavioural and traditional analytics, which allows more profound insight into your data. Furthermore, Matomo fully complies with the strictest privacy regulations worldwide, including GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA.

  Standout features include multi-touch attribution, visits log, content engagement, ecommerce, customer segments, event tracking, goal tracking, custom dimensions, custom reports, automated email reports, tag manager, sessions recordings, roll-up reporting that can pull data from multiple websites or mobile apps, Google Analytics importer, Matomo tag manager, comprehensive visitor tracking, heatmaps, and more.

  Integrations with 100+ technologies, including Cloudflare, WordPress, Magento, Google Ads, Drupal, WooCommerce, Vue, SharePoint and Wix.

  Pricing is free for Matomo On-Premise and $23 per month for Matomo Cloud, which comes with a 21-day free trial (no credit card required).

  Strengths

  • Privacy focused
  • Cookieless consent banners
  • 100% accurate, unsampled data
  • Open-source code 
  • Complete data ownership (no sharing with third parties)
  • Self-hosting and cloud-based options
  • Built-in GDPR Manager
  • Custom alerts, white labelling, dashboards and reports

  Community critiques 

  • Premium features are expensive and proprietary
  • Learning curve for non-technical users

  2. Mixpanel – Best for product analytics

  Mixpanel is a dedicated product analytics tool. It tracks and analyses customer interactions with a product across different platforms and helps optimise digital products to improve the user experience. It works with real-time data and can provide answers from customer and revenue data in seconds.

  It also presents data visualisations to show how customers interact with products.

  

  Mixpanel allows you to play around filters and views to reveal and chart some useful customer trends. (Image source)

  Why Mixpanel : One of the strengths of this platform is the ability to test hypotheses. Need to test an ambitious idea ? Mixpanel data can do it with real user analytics. That allows you to make data-driven decisions to find the best path forward.

  Standout features include automatic funnel segment analysis, behavioural segmentation, cohort segmentation, collaboration support, customisable dashboards, data pipelines, filtered data views, SQL queries, warehouse connectors and a wide range of pre-built integrations.

  Integrations available include Appcues, AppsFlyer, AWS, Databox, Figma, Google Cloud, Hotjar, HubSpot, Intercom, Integromat, MailChimp, Microsoft Azure, Segment, Slack, Statsig, VWO, Userpilot, WebEngage, Zapier, ZOH) and dozens of others.

  Pricing starts with a freemium plan valid for up to 20 million events per month. The growth plan is affordable at $25 per month and adds features like no-code data transformations and data pipeline add-ons. The enterprise version runs at a monthly cost of $833 and provides the full suite of features and services and premium support.

  There’s a caveat. Those prices only allow up to 1,000 Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs), calculated based on the number of visitors that perform a qualifying event each month. Beyond that, MTU plans start at $20,000 per year.

  Strengths

  • User behaviour and interaction tracking
  • Unlimited cohort segmentation capabilities
  • Drop-off analysis showing where users get stuck
  • A/B testing capabilities

  Community critiques 

  • Expensive enterprise features
  • Extensive setup and configuration requirements

  3. Google Analytics 4 – Best free web analytics tool

  The first thing to know about Google Analytics 4 is that it’s a web analytics tool. In other words, it tracks sessions, not user behaviours in app environments. It can provide details on how people found your website and how they go there, but it doesn’t offer much detail on how people use your product. 

  There is also an enterprise version, Google Analytics 360, which is not free. We’ve broken down the differences between the two versions elsewhere.

  

  GA4’s audience overview shows visitors, sessions, session lengths, bounce rates, and user engagement data. (Image source)

   

  Why Google Analytics : It’s great for gauging the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, tracking goal completions (purchases, cart additions, etc.) and spotting trends and patterns in user engagement.

  Standout features include built-in automation, customisable conversion goals, data drill-down functionality, detailed web acquisition metrics, media spend ROI calculations and out-of-the-box web analytics reporting.

  Integrations include all major CRM platforms, CallRail, DoubleClick DCM, Facebook, Hootsuite, Marketo, Shopify, VWO, WordPress, Zapier and Zendesk, among many others.

  Pricing is free for the basic version (Google Analytics 4) and scales based on features and data volume. The advanced features (in Google Analytics 360) are pitched at enterprises, and pricing is custom.

  Strengths

  • Free to start
  • Multiple website management
  • Traffic source details
  • Up-to-date traffic data

  Community critiques 

  • Steep learning curve 
  • Data sampling

  4. Adobe Analytics – Best for predictive analytics

  A fully configured Adobe Analytics implementation is the Swiss army knife of analytics tools. It begins with web analytics, adds product analytics, and then wraps it up nicely with predictive analytics.

  Unlike all the Amplitude alternatives here, there’s no free version. Adobe Analytics has a complicated pricing matrix with options like website analytics, marketing analytics, attribution, and predictive analytics. It also has a wide range of customisation options that will appeal to large businesses. But for smaller organisations, it may all be a bit too much.

  Mixpanel allows you to play around filters and views to reveal and chart some useful customer trends. (Image source)

  

  Adobe Analytics’ cross-channel attribution ties actions from different channels into a single customer journey. (Image source)

   

  Why Adobe Analytics : For current Adobe customers, this is a logical next step. Either way, Adobe Analytics can combine, evaluate, and analyse data from any part of the customer journey. It analyses that data with predictive intelligence to provide insights to enhance customer experiences.

   

  Standout features include AI-powered prediction analysis, attribution analysis, multi-channel data collection, segmentation and detailed customer journey analytics, product analytics and web analytics.

   

  Integrations are available through the Adobe Experience Cloud Exchange. Adobe Analytics also supports data exchange with brands such as BrightEdge, Branch.io, Google Ads, Hootsuite, Invoca, Salesforce and over 200 other integrations.

   

  Pricing starts at $500 monthly, but prospective customers are encouraged to contact the company for a needs-based quotation.

   

  Strengths

  • Drag-and-drop interface
  • Flexible segmentation 
  • Easy-to-create conversion funnels
  • Threshold-based alerts and notifications

  Community critiques 

  • No free version
  • Lack of technical support
  • Steep learning curve

  5. Umami – Best lightweight tool for web analytics

  The second of our open-source analytics solutions is Umami, a favourite in the software development community. Like Matomo, it’s a powerful and privacy-focused alternative that offers complete data control and respects user privacy. It’s also available as a cloud-based freemium plan or as a self-hosted solution.

   

  

  Umami’s dashboard reveals the busiest times of day and which pages are visited when.(Image source)

   

  Why Umami : Unami has a clear and simple user interface (UI) that lets you measure important metrics such as page visits, referrers, and user agents. It also features event tracking, although some reviewers complain that it’s quite limited.

  Standout features can be summed up in five words : privacy, simplicity, lightweight, real-time, and open-source. Unami’s UI is clean, intuitive and modern, and it doesn’t slow down your website. 

  Integrations include plugins for VuePress, Gatsby, Craft CMS, Docusaurus, WordPress and Publii, and a module for Nuxt. Unami’s API communicates with Javascript, PHP Laravel and Python.

  Pricing is free for up to 100k monthly events and three websites, but with limited support and data retention restrictions. The Pro plan costs $20 a month and gives you unlimited websites and team members, a million events (plus $0.00002 for each event over that), five years of data and email support. Their Enterprise plan is priced custom.

  Strengths

  • Freemium plan
  • Open-source
  • Lightweight 

  Community critiques 

  • Limited support options
  • Data retention restrictions
  • No funnel functionality

  6. Heap – Best for automatic data capture

  Product analytics with a twist is a good description of Heap. It features event auto-capture to track user interactions across all touchpoints in the user journey. This lets you fully understand how and why customers engage with your product and website. 

  Using a single Javascript snippet, Heap automatically collects data on everything users do, including how they got to your website. It also helps identify how different cohorts engage with your product, providing the critical insights teams need to boost conversion rates.

  

  Heap’s journeys feature combines funnel and path analysis. (Image source)

   

  Why Heap : The auto-capture functionality solves a major shortcoming of many product analytics tools — manual tracking. Instead of having to set up manual tags on events, Heap automatically captures all data on user activity from the start. 

  Standout features include event auto-capture, session replay, heatmaps, segments (or cohorts) and journeys, the last of which combines the functions of funnel and path analysis tools into a single feature.

  Integrations include AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, major CRM platforms, Snowflake and many other data manipulation platforms.

  Pricing is quote-based across all payment tiers. There is also a free plan and a 14-day free trial.

  Strengths

  • Session replay
  • Heatmaps 
  • User segmentation
  • Simple setup 
  • Event auto-capture 

  Community critiques 

  • No A/B testing functionality
  • No GDPR compliance support

  Choosing the best solution for your team

  When selecting a tool, it’s crucial to understand how product analytics and web analytics solutions differ. 

  Product analytics tools track users or accounts and record the features they use, the funnels they move through, and the cohorts they’re part of. Web analytics tools focus more on sessions than users because they’re interested in data that can help improve website usage. 

  Some tools combine product and web analytics to do both of these jobs.

  Area of focus

  Product analytics tools track user behaviour within SaaS- or app-based products. They’re helpful for analysing features, user journeys, engagement metrics, product development and iteration. 

  Web analytics tools analyse web traffic, user demographics, and traffic sources. They’re most often used for marketing and SEO insights.

  Level of detail

  Product analytics tools provide in-depth tracking and analysis of user interactions, feature usage, and cohort analysis.

  Web analytics tools provide broader data on page views, bounce rates, and conversion tracking to analyse overall site performance.

  Whatever tools you try, your first step should be to search for reviews online to see what people who’ve used them think about them. There are some great review sites you can try. See what people are saying on Capterra, G2, Gartner Peer Insights, or TrustRadius. 

  Use Matomo to power your web and app analytics

  Web and product analytics is a competitive field, and there are many other tools worth considering. This list is a small cross-section of what’s available.

  That said, if you have concerns about privacy and costs, consider choosing Matomo. Start your 21-day free trial today.

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