When I enter a link in the estimate cloud for any of my beacons, I show an estimate link and icon when the message actually appears on the Android phone. Why or How can I change this? I want my link and icon to appear. No offense Estimate. I’ve sent several emails to support and sales and have yet to receive a response. Can someone please tell me how this can be changed?
Sadly, there’s no option to change either at this time.
For a bit more technical explanation, we’re doing a JavaScript redirect instead of an HTTP redirect. This allows Here & Now to work properly even with non-HTTPS pages, but as a side-effect, the Physical Web crawler/bot doesn’t actually follow the redirect to the destination page, and so it shows the URL and the icon of the Estimote server. (I guess it would be possible to set up a custom domain as an alias for our Here & Now domain, and use that instead. And for icon, if the crawler supports the <link rel="icon">, we could allow customizing that. At this time however, that’s not something we have.)
An alternative I guess would be to use the regular link-shortener services out there, which most of the time do an HTTP redirect, so both the link and icon should be those of the destination page.
I have used the URL shortener as well and just get the same results. Why couldn’t you strip out the properties and reassemble in your JavaScript? Otherwise the advertisement is for Estimote.
This should be a simple fix for your backend. Is this something that isn’t going to be fixed? If not, I need to look at other vendors for my company.
Oh damn, sorry, I thought I replied yesterday but apparently it didn’t went through.
With the URL shortener approach, you need to set it directly on a “plain” Eddystone-URL packet, and bypass Here & Now. Otherwise, it’s: smartphone => Here & Now servers => URL shortener servers => your page, and it runs into the same issue where the PW bot/crawler stops at H&N.
Thanks for the response. However, I am guessing this means there are no plans to change the H&N functionality ? Using H&N would greatly help my company.
not response yet, I have a same problem…
regards
Indeed, no current plans to change this H&N behavior. If this is a show-stopper for you, I’d recommend just switching to plain Eddystone-URL + link shorteners for URL management. (Or Eddystone-UID + Google’s beacon cloud to assign URLs to the Eddy-UID beacons via their cloud dashboard, but that’s more complex to set up.)
How does this allow H&N to work properly if the bot doesn’t actually follow the redirect? I don’t mind showing the Icon and URL of estimote, but I do want it to redirect to my URL.
*** note *** Got it to work by using a true https page ie: no external video or java on page
The bot doesn’t follow the redirect (so it shows the title/description you’ve set in Here & Now), because it’s a JavaScript redirect, and bots don’t use JavaScript. But when the user opens the page in a normal web browser, with JavaScript enabled, there’s a JavaScript redirect on the page, so the user gets redirected to the final URL just fine.