Today I’m announcing Version 0.4 of my new Gem: Universal Track Manager.
It’s an great little utility project that will surely have appeal to many websites and developers.
Visitors come to your site every day. Along with their visits, four key pieces of information come along for the ride:
— IP address
— browser name (which lets you infer operating system and sometimes device)
— UTM parameters (if they clicked from another site or an ad campaign)
— HTTP referrer, (which shows if they clicked directly from another site to your site, even when no UTMs are set)
Universal Track Manager, a play-on-words that shares an acronym with “UTM Parameters,” is a plug & play gem to automatically scoop up this information and stash it into your database. You can think of it like a built-in Google Analytics (without the fancy dashboard).
With a tiny bit of trickery, support for Viewport size too is possible (width X height of the users’s window), which can let you determine if the user is on a desktop or mobile browser.
Today I’ve bumped the version up to 0.4. (I realize I made a 10x version change but this Gem is nearing its ‘version 1.0’ release so I am anticipating that when it is feature complete.)
This is the second version I’m dubbing as ‘public beta.’ Although this is production-quality code, it should be used with caution until it is no longer in BETA status. Please give it a try on your Rails projects today. With an easy 3-step installation into any Rails 4+ app and you can sit back and sweep up tracking info on your visitors.
*MOST* of the core functionality now works! This version 0.4 implements fully support for timestamping your visits, the user’s IP address, browser, and UTMs.
Support for HTTP referrer and more coming soon! Kindly submit feedback via Github.
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