4 ms·

Great job Jason. I was looking for something like this for a long time. I have few questions which are not explained much on your site: - you say it does not u

by forcer 16y ago

Great job Jason. I was looking for something like this for a long time. I have few questions which are not explained much on your site: - you say it does not use database but stores result on the client? how does it work? can I loose the results when IIS is restarted etc. ? - any screenshot of your dashboard? I know its probably not your main business so you dont want to waste lots of time on it but I think it is a great idea and you should make a business out of it. We currently pay $150 a month for VWO and its a fantastic tool but it limits us to test on certain websites which have lots of traffic as VWO and any other tool on the market charges per number of visitors tested. Your tool as its self-hosted solution wouldn't have these economics so you can charge few hundred dollars for a license with unlimited tests etc.

jasonkester 16y ago
It uses cookies to store participation and conversion data, so as a visitor you'll come away with a cookie that looks like this: ab:ID=1212802769|Tests=header_caption,register_payment_message,account_instructions,setup_navigation|Conversions=header_caption That way, we can simply ask the visitor whether he's participating in a given test, and we can know not to score him twice for anything. All that lives on the server is a file at the root called tests.ab holding a few k worth of participation and conversion tallies. Every time anything changes, it checks to see if it's saved its state in the last minute, and if not it simply serializes itself to XML and dumps that to disk. If it ever finds itself uninitialized (such as on a server reset), it attempts to load its last saved state. So long as you remember to ignore that tests.ab file as part of your deploy, it'll survive intact. As to selling it, I'm all about bringing in the cash, but a hosted option wouldn't really work for this. First, it's architected specifically so there's hardly anything to host. Second, its big advantage over something like Visual Website Optimizer is that your pages don't hang while requesting resources from a 3rd party. Don't worry. I've got other stuff bringing in revenue (like the site this is hosted on, for instance), but thanks for the suggestion!
- forcer 16y ago
  Thanks for the explanation - now I know it serializes to a file which is fine - I wasn't sure how it can keep the state only by storing on the user side. Self-hosted solution - I probably didn't explain myself well I meant that its great it can be self-hosted rather than relying on 3rd party website like VWO.
  - jasonkester 16y ago
    No, you explained yourself quite well. I just didn't read it correctly. As a compiled .dll you drop into your project, you could probably market it to decision makers and get them to force it on the devs, hoping that nobody every bothered to decompile it and realize it's only a few hundred lines of code. I'm sure there's a business in the self-hosted AB space, but for the moment I'm not excited enough about it to pursue it.

by forcer 16y ago

jasonkester 16y ago

It uses cookies to store participation and conversion data, so as a visitor you'll come away with a cookie that looks like this: ab:ID=1212802769|Tests=header_caption,register_payment_message,account_instructions,setup_navigation|Conversions=header_caption That way, we can simply ask the visitor whether he's participating in a given test, and we can know not to score him twice for anything. All that lives on the server is a file at the root called tests.ab holding a few k worth of participation and conversion tallies. Every time anything changes, it checks to see if it's saved its state in the last minute, and if not it simply serializes itself to XML and dumps that to disk. If it ever finds itself uninitialized (such as on a server reset), it attempts to load its last saved state. So long as you remember to ignore that tests.ab file as part of your deploy, it'll survive intact. As to selling it, I'm all about bringing in the cash, but a hosted option wouldn't really work for this. First, it's architected specifically so there's hardly anything to host. Second, its big advantage over something like Visual Website Optimizer is that your pages don't hang while requesting resources from a 3rd party. Don't worry. I've got other stuff bringing in revenue (like the site this is hosted on, for instance), but thanks for the suggestion!

forcer 16y ago
Thanks for the explanation - now I know it serializes to a file which is fine - I wasn't sure how it can keep the state only by storing on the user side. Self-hosted solution - I probably didn't explain myself well I meant that its great it can be self-hosted rather than relying on 3rd party website like VWO.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  No, you explained yourself quite well. I just didn't read it correctly. As a compiled .dll you drop into your project, you could probably market it to decision makers and get them to force it on the devs, hoping that nobody every bothered to decompile it and realize it's only a few hundred lines of code. I'm sure there's a business in the self-hosted AB space, but for the moment I'm not excited enough about it to pursue it.