

WebServerUid: Easy Unique Browser IDs for Rails - geweke
https://swiftype.com/blog/web-server-uid.html

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geweke
I'm the author of this gem -- more than happy to help out with it.

The problem it solves is small but important, and this is now the third
company at which I've solved it...so I'm sure there are more folks out there
dealing with this same issue. ;)

~~~
callmeed
This is cool, thanks for building this.

Besides analytics, seems like this could help SaaS products that want to offer
a trial or demo without ever creating an account up front–just spin up an
account on the fly with the uid. If they actually signup, marge their real
info.

I'll definitely be trying this out.

~~~
geweke
Sure thing -- I built it because I needed it, but I'm really happy to be able
to share it, too.

You definitely could use this for trial/demo accounts, too. You'd want to
think carefully about abuse prevention, I suspect, but in the right
circumstances it could be a really lightweight way to handle this.

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josegonzalez
This is similar to the Sysadvent 2013 post by TR Jordan on using an `X-Trace`
header to track users across your stack:

[http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2013/12/day-5-gentle-
introduct...](http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2013/12/day-5-gentle-introduction-
to-x-trace.html)

~~~
geweke
Nice! Thanks for turning me on to that -- I've been looking for something like
that.

I actually think they're pretty different problems. WebServerUid is about
uniquely identifying a single browser over hours, days, months, or years,
while X-Trace is about tracking a single request over its (hopefully) single-
second-at-most lifecycle -- but they're both really useful, and I'm glad you
posted that link.

