bluepeter

As a legit biz trying to win legit links, this is such a hassle to deal with.

Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs.

But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space.

Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages.

Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.

I've been following this closely. There's no real data on the following:

- Is this happening in other countries? I cannot find really any established diagnoses outside of the US (though some countries have CDC-like pages on it).

- What is the gender breakdown?

- What is the age breakdown? (mean, median, SD)

- What is the geo breakdown? (city vs rural, major geo areas)

ITT TIL MailChimp sucks.

Thanks!

It actually does 3 different comparisons... namely, we do a pixel-by-pixel comparison, a DOM comparison, and a "content" comparison (i.e., the words that the end-user sees).

We only trigger a new version that we alert the customer about, however, when actual content changes. We provide the pixel-by-pixel screenshot, too (but it's often not very useful unless the changes are very small and image based). (We also don't currently show the DOM comparison as we assume it won't be valuable for most of our target customers.)

Thank you very much! We agree that it would be helpful for staffing agencies to monitor key staff defections or openings.

We're using Google Headless Chrome and Puppeteer on AWS Fargate to make this happen. We had it on Lambda, but we gave up and moved it to ECS/Fargate after too many hiccups.

This is what happens when you do user testing and the users you primarily test are only internal folks.

Apple, next time: take your prototype, throw a handful of fine sand on the keyboard and shake... if it can't be fixed by customers (via canister air or removing/cleaning the keys), then rework.

P.S., I am tying this now on this absolute crap keyboard with multiple letters sticky and repeating.

> If a locality can enforce its local tax laws, what other custom crafted local laws can it enforce in return for access to customers?

Obscenity, for one.

Unlikely. This is similar to an occupancy tax... why not soak out-of-state guests who don't have much choice in the matter, and won't be voting to do away with the tax. A SaaS business is going to refuse to do business w/, say, Proctor & Gamble and pay Ohio sales taxes? No way.

Yes.

> You'd think something this important would be all over hacker news and social media

It's the top story on... Hacker News.

100k or 200 transactions... that 200 bar is pretty easy to hit w/ monthly subscription SaaS providers.

Time to push those annual (vs monthly) SaaS plans I guess...

Any idea how this will affect SaaS folks with no physical products?

Ads like this no doubt. https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784

Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?

And even worse MSFT/LinkedIn is suing a small company for spidering LinkedIn's data.

ITT Russians w/ a plan.

Hi folks. We built this with about 40 Lambda functions on the backend. We use headless Chrome and puppeteer. It was a little tricky getting everything working on Lambda, including re-use of cookies/local storage.

Hi folks: I spent the last few months working on this. The backend is about 40 Lambda functions. I even wrangled headless Chrome into a Lambda function, and preserve state (cookies, local storage) across multiple pages. Any feedback (or questions?) on my product would be great!

> In fact, if you have stateless services, then I'd be inclined to consider skipping microservices altogether and consider using a serverless model.

What? Isn't a serverless model necessarily a microservices solution?

It's probably not as easy as that. Lambda functions run in a container. If you have a spike in traffic, you may have 10 different containers handling requests. So should they keep 1 container always up, or 3, or 10. I suppose you could have some ELB-type rules to "auto-scale" new containers...

They do for me. It's basically free to fire a function every 5 minutes, have the function immediately close, and have that Lambda container sit around for another ~10 minutes "hot" and waiting for a real request to handle.

> Cold starts. This isn’t the time to dive in deep, but it’s a main reason why some companies decided against going Serverless.

Cold starts as an issue? I mean, all you have to do is create a CloudWatch event (or cron if you want an explicit server involved) to fire the Lambda function every few minutes and you're all good. Sure, if you get heavy traffic, I suppose you could have multiple containers running simultaneously? But that's also easy enough to handle w/ CW events.

Ignore their spammy emails? Per their VP, they are totally going to up their game and inject their "notifications" in your everyday Web traffic. https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/939848009386549248

Comcast VP suit isn't helping his cause much on Twitter https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/939248407562080261

Oh and of course he's also retweeting a lovely Net Neutrality tweet... https://twitter.com/feamster/status/938236691126636546

Open range is a thing in the Western US too.

We offer “full page” rendering using PhantomJS (soon to be headless Chrome) for Versionista, a competing product. It works rather well, but it introduces its own set of problems... eg you need timers to ensure all the AJAX calls have completed, and so on.

That’s exactly what we use for a competing product. The difficulty is less in the crawling, and more in the scheduling and difference visualization (including filters). Presenting salient results without a ton of false positives is hard work.