Today I’m announcing ‘a first look’ at my new Gem: Universal Track Manager. It’s an ambitious project that’s going to have nearly universal appeal and utility.
Visitors come to your site every day. Along with their visits, 4 key pieces of information come along for the ride:
— IP address
— browser name (which lets you infer operating system)
— UTMs showing if they clicked from another site, or if they came from online advertising (typically you can “auto-tag” your ad campaigns and your UTMs will be magically populated)
— 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 your one-stop shop to automatically pick up this information and stash it into your database. You can think of it like a built-in Google Analytics (without the fancy dashboard).
As if that weren’t ambitious enough, with a tiny bit of trickery I’m planning support for optional Viewport size (width X height), which can let you determine if the user is on a desktop or mobile browser. (coming soon)
I’m pleased to announce Version 0.0.3, the first 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. You are welcome to give it a whirl 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 0.0.3 implements fully support for timestamping your visits, the user’s IP address and browser. Support for UTMs & HTTP referrer and more coming soon! If you are curious now’s a great time to try it out, please submit feedback via Github.
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