6 Months of Security Links #2011

I’m a regular curator of daily links, and like to give overviews of my collection of curated links and posts. This is partly as there are some good sources and articles in here and as I am working on a research project which I started based on a number of books I read.

I’m sure you’ll find something interesting in the items below – there are some gems in the list – and I dare to hazard the guess you might learn something you wanted to know. 🙂

Proof of Concept: A/B Testing (cont.) #user #metrics

In a previous article this week I mentioned that I wanted to create an A/B Testing PoC for myself, something I could use to see which item was more effective on my site. This is a pretty rough piece of code, which means that you will need to get a programmer to have a look at it. The image you see on the write is dependent on whether you are A or B, the underlying link also points do a different location.

You can try it out by clicking on the image.

You can find the code on Google Code: Super Secret Stuff. Or you can download the code in a gzip or bzip2 file here.

Proof of Concept: A/B Testing without Dynamic Scripting #user #metrics

Using the online version of WordPress is sometimes irritating, no scripting is allowed and when I want to do some kind of testing in my website itself I am limited by what functionality is permitted. So I decided to muse on what I do have:

• make a post sticky on top
• use the right sidebar
• limited css

What can I do within the limits?

I decided to create an image and link block, due to the limits of WordPress they must contain fixed values. So the dynamic portion is handled by the code backing the link and image. Once the image is displayed the cookie which is associated with the image and link is set. This cookie is used when the link is clicked to 302 redirect the user to the page to which the image refers.


<a style="display:fixed;top:100px;left:100px;margin:1px;"
        href="http://example.com/link?placement=12345">
        <img width="100" height="100"
                src="http://example.com/image.png?placement=12345"/>
</a>


The data which can be extracted are:

• Campaign
• Referring Page
• Specific Placement

The tests you can run:

• A/B Tests
• Segment Tests
• Multivariate Tests

I’ll be posting more on A/B Tests and a script for you to try in the coming week.

Image source: Daniel Eizans