Month: November 2018

Facebook has begun adding a querystring parameter to outbound links- the FBCLID – aka facebook click id. This parameter is annoying for many when they try to copy and then paste or share a link to something they clicked on from facebook, as a normally clean and even short url now has this big ugly FBCLID parameter appended to it.

I assume this parameter has been added to assist with tracking facebook clicks with websites that may not have cookie tracking enabled, but it could also be to help track how links are shared with others- as this would let facebook see who visited the orginal link and then who they shared it with, as it has a unique FBCLID value assigned to it.

My hope is that this click id will allow for more granular conversion tracking for facebook ad clicks. Currently, facebook requires a pixel be installed on your landing page and any conversion events you wish to track are script executed on the page. This works well overall, but it is not optimal for lifetime value calculations inside the facebook adcenter. If an ecommerce store has an offline conversion, or doesn’t know the true value of a conversion until a day after the initial interaction, this information is difficult to load back into facebook so the ads can be auto-optimized. I’ll be researching this more soon but my hope is that the fbclid parameter will allow us to store a unique visitor ID and then load conversions with associated values back into facebook- possibly later and also perhaps multiple conversions- and have an accurate profitability number that we can then tune and optimize ad spend against. I will update as I learn more about this.

My first software “product” was a BBS fancy menu generator that utilized ANSI based colors and those funky shaded block characters, to generate a completely new and semi-randomized background pattern on every load. Written in pascal. It ran on a couple BBS’s. Yay.

Today I thought about those ANSI codes and whether they still work in Windows consoles today- found this article on the topic

https://www.jerriepelser.com/blog/using-ansi-color-codes-in-net-console-apps/

Short answer – In modern Windows 10, Yes- but your app need to call some system api’s to enable it, and this is considered fragile. Apparently the safer way to do this, in .Net at least, is via the Console.SetforegroundColor and similar. It looks like Node.js has a built-in layer that decodes the ansi escape codes into these api calls as a sort of proxy, so maybe .Net could use something like this as well? Ok, back to real work.