TLC Blog

It’s June! Six months into a year that feels like it has seen brighter days. As always, the Tealium Recruiting team is moving forward - we’ve made several key hires with more on the way and making progress on various initiatives slated for 2020. Nevertheless, it has been impossible to ignore the collective fear and uncertainty we all face in the time of Covid-19.

These days there's no shortage of privacy and security issues to concern yourself with, and there's good reason for it. While the vast majority of online systems are secure, there's always a risk that one component in a system will get compromised. The way websites are built these days, with hundreds of components, many third-party JavaScript libraries have become ubiquitous and used by millions of sites. This is a great convenience to developers of websites, but it's also an attractive target for the "bad guys" that want to hack your site. 

Tealium is a data hub platform that processes events at a large scale. We've seen tremendous growth in the amount of incoming customer data, where a single account might receive up to 30k events per second. Each of those events is then processed through a real-time data pipeline that requires a massive event driven system. This has forced us to evaluate which message broker platform will serve us best in the long-term: RabbitMQ or Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK).

Google decided with AMP HTML cache to copy the world's content to their own CDNs on google.com, effectively keeping visitors on the google.com domain even after clicking a Google search result. This creates an interesting analytics challenge when your visitors are viewing your content, but are still on google.com. And when that visitor clicks a link to eventually arrive on your original website, it becomes difficult to build an accurate visitor path report using traditional web analytics tools.

Since data is the foundation for the Tealium solution, setting up a consistent data layer is a vital first step for implementation. The data layer defines attributes about your website or mobile app, such as country code or page name, as well as important user behaviors to track, such as logins and purchases.

As we all know, although the functionality of Load Rules is similar to Conditions, we can't manage extensions using Load Rules or use those Load Rules to replace Extension Conditions. Load Rules are always in the same location in the UI and can be applied more than once which makes them easy to maintain. They also have the bonus ability to manage timeframes as conditions as well. We often have the problem of needing to maintain multiple extensions with the same Conditions which could be leveraged by a Load Rule instead. Here is my take on how we can take advantage of Load Rules within Extensions, and perhaps simplify some implementation and maintenance.

Implementing the Tealium Universal Tag (utag.js) on your website isn't rocket science, but it does require a fair amount of pre-planning and requirements gathering. We have a whole team of implementation specialists dedicated to guiding customers through this initial process. It's a non-trivial amount of work to get a robust implementation deployed to your production site. Which is why it's worth thinking about your long-term strategy for maintaining that implementation.

Tealium hosted 51 of San Diego's most ambitious coders this past weekend for a friendly competition and some stellar networking! After sessions with some of our in-house technical experts, attendees were set free to code and impress the judges with their presentations.

I've written a few posts on the topic of Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) updates in the Safari web browser. Probably the most significant impact from these updates is ITP's restrictions around client-side cookies, specifically, that client-side cookies expire after seven (7) days.

We invite the best and brightest to join us in San Diego for a friendly competition and the chance to win one of our many prizes. Tealium’s Game of Codes will run from August 17th through August 18th, with optional break outs for contestants and clients alike to learn more about the Tealium technology stack.