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Autres articles (73)

  • MediaSPIP version 0.1 Beta

    16 avril 2011, par

    MediaSPIP 0.1 beta est la première version de MediaSPIP décrétée comme "utilisable".
    Le fichier zip ici présent contient uniquement les sources de MediaSPIP en version standalone.
    Pour avoir une installation fonctionnelle, il est nécessaire d’installer manuellement l’ensemble des dépendances logicielles sur le serveur.
    Si vous souhaitez utiliser cette archive pour une installation en mode ferme, il vous faudra également procéder à d’autres modifications (...)

  • MediaSPIP 0.1 Beta version

    25 avril 2011, par

    MediaSPIP 0.1 beta is the first version of MediaSPIP proclaimed as "usable".
    The zip file provided here only contains the sources of MediaSPIP in its standalone version.
    To get a working installation, you must manually install all-software dependencies on the server.
    If you want to use this archive for an installation in "farm mode", you will also need to proceed to other manual (...)

  • Personnaliser en ajoutant son logo, sa bannière ou son image de fond

    5 septembre 2013, par

    Certains thèmes prennent en compte trois éléments de personnalisation : l’ajout d’un logo ; l’ajout d’une bannière l’ajout d’une image de fond ;

Sur d’autres sites (11125)

  • Sequencing MIDI From A Chiptune

    28 avril 2013, par Multimedia Mike — Outlandish Brainstorms

    The feature requests for my game music appreciation website project continue to pour in. Many of them take the form of “please add player support for system XYZ and the chiptune library to go with it.” Most of these requests are A) plausible, and B) in process. I have also received recommendations for UI improvements which I take under consideration. Then there are the numerous requests to port everything from Native Client to JavaScript so that it will work everywhere, even on mobile, a notion which might take a separate post to debunk entirely.

    But here’s an interesting request about which I would like to speculate : Automatically convert a chiptune into a MIDI file. I immediately wanted to dismiss it as impossible or highly implausible. But, as is my habit, I started pondering the concept a little more carefully and decided that there’s an outside chance of getting some part of the idea to work.

    Intro to MIDI
    MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It’s a standard musical interchange format and allows music instruments and computers to exchange musical information. The file interchange format bears the extension .mid and contains a sequence of numbers that translate into commands separated by time deltas. E.g. : turn key on (this note, this velocity) ; wait x ticks ; turn key off ; wait y ticks ; etc. I’m vastly oversimplifying, as usual.

    MIDI fascinated me back in the days of dialup internet and discrete sound cards (see also my write-up on the Gravis Ultrasound). Typical song-length MIDI files often ranged from a few kilobytes to a few 10s of kilobytes. They were significantly smaller than the MOD et al. family of tracker music formats mostly by virtue of the fact that MIDI files aren’t burdened by transporting digital audio samples.

    I know I’m missing a lot of details. I haven’t dealt much with MIDI in the past… 15 years or so (ever since computer audio became a blur of MP3 and AAC audio). But I’m led to believe it’s still relevant. The individual who requested this feature expressed an interest in being able to import the sequenced data into any of the many music programs that can interpret .mid files.

    The Pitch
    To limit the scope, let’s focus on music that comes from the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System or the original Game Boy. The former features 2 square wave channels, a triangle wave, a noise channel, and a limited digital channel. The latter creates music via 2 square waves, a wave channel, and a noise channel. The roles that these various channels usually play typically break down as : square waves represent the primary melody, triangle wave is used to simulate a bass line, noise channel approximates a variety of percussive sounds, and the DPCM/wave channels are fairly free-form. They can have random game sound effects or, if they are to assist in the music, are often used for more authentic percussive sounds.

    The various channels are controlled via an assortment of memory-mapped hardware registers. These registers are fed values such as frequency, volume, and duty cycle. My idea is to modify the music playback engine to track when various events occur. Whenever a channel is turned on or off, that corresponds to a MIDI key on or off event. If a channel is already playing but a new frequency is written, that would likely count as a note change, so log a key off event followed by a new key on event.

    There is the major obstacle of what specific note is represented by a channel in a particular state. The MIDI standard defines 128 different notes spanning 11 octaves. Empirically, I wonder if I could create a table which maps the assorted frequencies to different MIDI notes ?

    I think this strategy would only work with the square and triangle waves. Noise and digital channels ? I’m not prepared to tackle that challenge.

    Prior Work ?
    I have to wonder if there is any existing work in this area. I’m certain that people have wanted to do this before ; I wonder if anyone has succeeded ?

    Just like reverse engineering a binary program entails trying to obtain a higher level abstraction of a program from a very low level representation, this challenge feels like reverse engineering a piece of music as it is being performed and automatically expressing it in a higher level form.

  • Grand Unified Theory of Compact Disc

    1er février 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

    This is something I started writing about a decade ago (and I almost certainly have some of it wrong), back when compact discs still had a fair amount of relevance. Back around 2002, after a few years investigating multimedia technology, I took an interest in compact discs of all sorts. Even though there may seem to be a wide range of CD types, I generally found that they’re all fundamentally the same. I thought I would finally publishing something, incomplete though it may be.

    Physical Perspective
    There are a lot of ways to look at a compact disc. First, there’s the physical format, where a laser detects where pits/grooves have disturbed the smooth surface (a.k.a. lands). A lot of technical descriptions claim that these lands and pits on a CD correspond to ones and zeros. That’s not actually true, but you have to decide what level of abstraction you care about, and that abstraction is good enough if you only care about the discs from a software perspective.

    Grand Unified Theory (Software Perspective)
    Looking at a disc from a software perspective, I have generally found it useful to view a CD as a combination of a 2 main components :

    • table of contents (TOC)
    • a long string of sectors, each of which is 2352 bytes long

    I like to believe that’s pretty much all there is to it. All of the information on a CD is stored as a string of sectors that might be chopped up into a series of anywhere from 1-99 individual tracks. The exact sector locations where these individual tracks begin are defined in the TOC.

    Audio CDs (CD-DA / Red Book)
    The initial purpose for the compact disc was to store digital audio. The strange sector size of 2352 bytes is an artifact of this original charter. “CD quality audio”, as any multimedia nerd knows, is formally defined as stereo PCM samples that are each 16 bits wide and played at a frequency of 44100 Hz.

    (44100 audio frames / 1 second) * (2 samples / audio frame) * 
      (16 bits / 1 sample) * (1 byte / 8 bits) = 176,400 bytes / second
    (176,400 bytes / 1 second) / (2352 bytes / 1 sector) = 75
    

    75 is the number of sectors required to store a single second of CD-quality audio. A single sector stores 1/75th of a second, or a ‘frame’ of audio (though I think ‘frame’ gets tossed around at all levels when describing CD formats).

    The term “red book” is thrown around in relation to audio CDs. There is a series of rainbow books that define various optical disc standards and the red book describes audio CDs.

    Basic Data CD-ROMs (Mode 1 / Yellow Book)
    Somewhere along the line, someone decided that general digital information could be stored on these discs. Hence, the CD-ROM was born. The standard model above still applies– TOC and string of 2352-byte sectors. However, it’s generally only useful to have a single track on a CD-ROM. Thus, the TOC only lists a single track. That single track can easily span the entire disc (something that would be unusual for a typical audio CD).

    While the model is mostly the same, the most notable difference between and audio CD and a plain CD-ROM is that, while each sector is 2352 bytes long, only 2048 bytes are used to store actual data payload. The remaining bytes are used for synchronization and additional error detection/correction.

    At least, the foregoing is true for mode 1 / form 1 CD-ROMs (which are the most common). “Mode 1″ CD-ROMs are defined by a publication called the yellow book. There is also mode 1 / form 2. This forgoes the additional error detection and correction afforded by form 1 and dedicates 2336 of the 2352 sector bytes to the data payload.

    CD-ROM XA (Mode 2 / Green Book)
    From a software perspective, these are similar to mode 1 CD-ROMs. There are also 2 forms here. The first form gives a 2048-byte data payload while the second form yields a 2324-byte data payload.

    Video CD (VCD / White Book)
    These are CD-ROM XA discs that carry MPEG-1 video and audio data.

    Photo CD (Beige Book)
    This is something I have never personally dealt with. But it’s supposed to conform to the CD-ROM XA standard and probably fits into my model. It seems to date back to early in the CD-ROM era when CDs were particularly cost prohibitive.

    Multisession CDs (Blue Book)
    Okay, I admit that this confuses me a bit. Multisession discs allow a user to burn multiple sessions to a single recordable disc. I.e., burn a lump of data, then burn another lump at a later time, and the final result will look like all the lumps were recorded as the same big lump. I remember this being incredibly useful and cost effective back when recordable CDs cost around US$10 each (vs. being able to buy a spindle of 100 CD-Rs for US$10 or less now). Studying the cdrom.h file for the Linux OS, I found a system call named CDROMMULTISESSION that returns the sector address of the start of the last session. If I were to hypothesize about how to make this fit into my model, I might guess that the TOC has some hint that the disc was recorded in multisession (which needs to be decided up front) and the CDROMMULTISESSION call is made to find the last session. Or it could be that a disc read initialization operation always leads off with the CDROMMULTISESSION query in order to determine this.

    I suppose I could figure out how to create a multisession disc with modern software, or possibly dig up a multisession disc from 15+ years ago, and then figure out how it should be read.

    CD-i
    This type puzzles my as well. I do have some CD-i discs and I thought that I could read them just fine (the last time I looked, which was many years ago). But my research for this blog post has me thinking that I might not have been seeing the entire picture when I first studied my CD-i samples. I was able to see some of the data, but sources indicate that only proper CD-i hardware is able to see all of the data on the disc (apparently, the TOC doesn’t show all of the sectors on disc).

    Hybrid CDs (Data + Audio)
    At some point, it became a notable selling point for an audio CD to have a data track with bonus features. Even more common (particularly in the early era of CD-ROMs) were computer and console games that used the first track of a disc for all the game code and assets and the remaining tracks for beautifully rendered game audio that could also be enjoyed outside the game. Same model : TOC points to the various tracks and also makes notes about which ones are data and which are audio.

    There seems to be 2 distinct things described above. One type is the mixed mode CD which generally has the data in the first track and the audio in tracks 2..n. Then there is the enhanced CD, which apparently used multisession recording and put the data at the end. I think that the reasoning for this is that most audio CD player hardware would only read tracks from the first session and would have no way to see the data track. This was a positive thing. By contrast, when placing a mixed-mode CD into an audio player, the data track would be rendered as nonsense noise.

    Subchannels
    There’s at least one small detail that my model ignores : subchannels. CDs can encode bits of data in subchannels in sectors. This is used for things like CD-Text and CD-G. I may need to revisit this.

    In Summary
    There’s still a lot of ground to cover, like how those sectors might be formatted to show something useful (e.g., filesystems), and how the model applies to other types of optical discs. Sounds like something for another post.

  • CRO Testing : The 6-Steps for Maximising Conversion Rates

    10 mars 2024, par Erin

    It’s a nightmare every marketing manager faces. Traffic is soaring after you’ve launched new digital marketing campaigns, but conversions have barely moved.

    Sound familiar ?

    The good news is you’re not alone — loads of marketing managers struggle to get potential customers to purchase. The better news is that you can test dozens of strategies to turn around your site’s fortunes. 

    Conversion rate optimisation testing (CRO testing for short) is the name for this kind of experimentation — and it can send conversion rates and revenue soaring.

    In this article, we’ll explain CRO testing and how you can start doing it today using Matomo. 

    What is CRO Testing ? 

    CRO testing is optimising your site’s conversion funnel using a series of experiments designed to improve conversion rates.

    A CRO test can take several forms, but it usually involves changing one or more elements of your landing page. It looks something like this :

    1. You hypothesise what you expect to happen.
    2. You then run an A/B test using a dedicated CRO platform or tool.
    3. This tool will divide your site’s traffic, sending one segment to one variation and the other segment to another.
    4. The CRO tool will measure conversions, track statistical significance, and declare one variation the winner. 

    A CRO tool isn’t the only software you can use to gather data when running tests. There are several other valuable data sources, including :

    • A web analytics platform : to identify issues with your website
    • User surveys : to find out what your target audience thinks about your site
    • Heatmaps : to learn where users focus their attention
    • Session recordings : to discover how visitors browse your site

    Use as many of these features, tools, and methods as you can when brainstorming hypotheses and measuring results. After all, your CRO test is only as good as your data.

    On that note, we need to mention the importance of data accuracy when researching issues with your website and running CRO tests. If you trust a platform like Google Analytics that uses data sampling (where only a subset of data is analysed), then there’s a risk you make business decisions based on inaccurate reports.

    In practice, that could see you overestimate the effectiveness of a landing page, potentially wasting thousands in ad spend on poorly converting pages. 

    That’s why over a million websites rely on Matomo as their web analytics solution—it doesn’t sample data, providing 100% accurate website traffic insights you can trust to make informed decisions.

    Try Matomo for Free

    Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

    No credit card required

    Types of CRO Testing 

    There are three core types of CRO tests :

    A/B testing

    A/B testing, or split testing, is when you test two versions of the same page against each other. Usually, the two pages have only one difference, such as a new headline or a different CTA. 

    An A/B test setup in Matomo

    In the test above, for example, we test what happens if we remove one of the affiliate links from a page. We hypothesise that conversions won’t change because these links aren’t effective.

    A/B/n testing

    A/B/n testing is when you test multiple variations of the same element on the same page. 

    Rather than just testing one headline against another, for example, you test multiple different headlines at once.

    A screenshot of A/B test results run using Matomo

    In the test above in Matomo, we’re testing a website’s original header against a wider and smaller version. It turns out the wider header converts significantly better. 

    Multivariate testing

    In a multivariate CRO test, you test multiple different elements at the same time. That could mean testing combining a different headline, CTA button, and image. 

    Multivariate testing can save time because you test multiple elements at once and find the best combination of elements. But you’ll usually need a lot of traffic to find a statistically significant result.

    Why is CRO testing important ?

    Who doesn’t want more conversions, right ? Improving your conversion rate is the core benefit of running a CRO test, but there are a couple of other reasons you should do it, too :

    Why Is CRO Testing Important?

    Improve conversion rates

    How well does your website convert visitors ? The average conversion rate of a typical website is 2.35%, but better-performing websites have significantly higher conversion rates. The top 25% of websites across all industries convert at a rate of 5.31% or higher.

    CRO testing is the best way to improve your site’s conversion rate by tweaking elements of your website and implementing the best results. And because it’s based on data, not your intuition, you’re likely to identify changes that move the needle. 

    Optimise the user experience

    CRO tests are also a great way to improve your site’s user experience. The process of CRO testing forces you to understand how users navigate your website using heatmaps and session recordings and fix the issues they face. 

    You could simplify your form fields to make them easier to fill in, for example, or make your pages easier to navigate. In both cases, your actions will also increase conversion rates.

    Decrease acquisition costs

    Improving your conversion rate using CRO testing will usually mean a decrease in customer acquisition costs and other conversion metrics

    After all, if the cost of your PPC ads stays the same but you convert more traffic, then each new customer will cost less to acquire.

    How to do CRO testing in 6 steps 

    Ready to get your hands dirty ? Follow these six steps to set up your first CRO test :

    Have a clear goal

    Don’t jump straight into testing. You need to be clear about what you want to achieve ; otherwise, you risk wasting time on irrelevant experiments. 

    If you’re unsure what to focus on, look back through your web analytics data and other tools like heatmaps, form analytics, and session recordings to get a feel for some of your site’s biggest conversion roadblocks. 

    Maybe there’s a page with a much lower conversion rate, for example — or a form that most users fail to complete. 

    If it’s the former, then your goal could be to increase the conversion rate of this specific landing page by 25%, bringing it in line with your site’s average. 

    The Goals dashboard in Matomo

    Make sure your new conversion goal is set up properly in your website analytics platform, too. This will ensure you’re tracking conversions accurately. 

    Set a hypothesis

    Now you’ve got a goal, it’s time to create a hypothesis. Based on your available research, a hypothesis is an assumption you make about your conversion rate optimisation test.

    A heatmap of your poorly converting landing page may show that users aren’t focusing on your CTA button because it’s hidden below the fold. 

    You could hypothesise that by placing the CTA button directly under your headline above the fold, your conversion rate should increase. 

    Whatever your goal, you can use the following template to write a hypothesis :

    If we [make this specific change], then [this specific outcome] will occur because [reason].

    Design your test elements

    Most marketing managers won’t be able to run CRO tests independently. A team of talented experts must create the assets you need for a successful experimentation. This includes designers, copywriters, and web developers. 

    Don’t just have them create one new element at a time. Accelerate the process by having your team create dozens of designs simultaneously. That way, you can run a new CRO test as soon as your current test has finished. 

    Create and launch the test

    It’s time to launch your test. Use a CRO tool to automate building your test and tracking results. 

    With Matomo’s A/B Testing feature, it’s as easy as giving your test a name, writing a hypothesis and description, and uploading the URLs of your page variants.

    How to create a new A/B test in Matomo

    Matomo handles everything else, giving you a detailed breakdown at the end of the test with the winning variant. 

    Try Matomo for Free

    Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

    No credit card required

    Analyse the results

    You can only review the results of your CRO test once it has reached statistical significance — which means the observed outcome isn’t the result of chance.

    In the same way you wouldn’t say a die is unbiased after three rolls, you need thousands of visitors to see your landing pages and take action before deciding which is better. 

    Luckily, most CRO testing platforms, including Matomo, will highlight when a test reaches statistical significance. That means you only need to look at the result to see if your hypothesis is correct. 

    Implement and repeat

    Was your test a success ? Great, you can implement the results and test a new element. 

    Yep, that’s right. There’s no time to rest on your laurels. Continuous CRO testing is necessary to squeeze every conversion possible from your website. Just like fashion trends, website effectiveness changes over time. What works today might not work tomorrow, making ongoing CRO testing beneficial and necessary.

    That’s why it’s a good idea to choose a CRO testing platform like Matomo with no data limits.

    Try Matomo for Free

    Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

    No credit card required

    CRO testing examples you can run today 

    There’s no shortage of CRO tests you can run. Here are some experiments to get started with :

    Change your CTA design and copy

    Calls to action (CTAs) are the best elements to optimise during your first CRO test. You can change many things about them ; even the smallest optimisation can have a huge impact. 

    Just take a look at the image below to see how diverse your CTAs could be :

    A range of different CTA buttons

    Changing your CTA’s copy is a great place to start, especially if you have generic instructions like “Apply Now.”

    Try a more specific instruction like “Download your free trial” or “Buy now to get 30% off.” Or test benefit-led instructions like “Reduce your ad spend today” or “Take back control of your data.”

    Changing the colour of your CTAs can also yield more conversions. Bright colours are always a good bet. Just make sure your button stands out from the rest of your page. 

    Move the CTA button placement

    The placement of your CTA can be just as important as its copy or colour. If it’s down at the bottom of your page, there’s a good chance most of your visitors will miss it. 

    Try moving it above the fold to see if that makes a difference. Then, test multiple CTA buttons as opposed to just one. 

    Heatmaps and session recordings can identify whether this test is worthwhile. If users rarely focus on your CTA or just don’t scroll far enough to find it, then it’s a good bet you could see an uptick in conversions by moving it. 

    Try different headlines

    Your website’s headlines are another great place to start CRO testing. These are usually the first (and sometimes only) things visitors read, so optimising them as much as possible makes sense. 

    There are entire books written about creating persuasive headlines, but start with one of the following tactics :

    • Include a benefit
      • “Achieve radiant skin—discover the secret !”
    • Add numbers
      • “3 foolproof methods for saving money on your next vacation”
    • Using negative words instead of positive ones
      • “Avoid these 7 mistakes to unlock your potential for personal growth”
    • Shortening or lengthening your headline
      • Shortened : “Crush your fitness goals : Expert tips for success”
      • Lengthened : “Embark on your fitness journey : Learn from experts with proven tips to crush your wellness goals”

    Add more trust signals

    Adding trust signals to your website, such as brand logos, customer reviews, and security badges, can increase your conversion rate.

    We use it at Matomo by adding the logos of well-known clients like the United Nations and Amnesty International underneath our CTAs.

    Trust signals on the Matomo website

    It’s incredibly effective, too. Research by Edelman finds that trust is among the top three most important buying decision factors, above brand likeability.

    Start CRO testing with Matomo

    CRO testing is a data-backed method to improve your site’s conversion rate, making it more user-friendly and decreasing customer acquisition costs. Even a small improvement will be worth the cost of the tools and your time. 

    Fortunately, there’s no need to allocate hundreds of dollars monthly for multiple specialised testing tools. With Matomo, you get a comprehensive platform offering web analytics, user behaviour insights, and CRO testing – all conveniently bundled into one solution. Matomo’s pricing starts from just $19 per month, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.

    Plus, rest assured knowing that you are GDPR compliant and the data provided is 100% accurate, ethically empowering you to make informed decisions with confidence.

    Take the first step on your CRO testing journey by trying Matomo free for 21 days ; no credit card required.