Traffic Android Blog

Traffic Android has several new developments in progress and a new feature in testing as well.

The new developments are:

• A brand new interface that is needed to make inclusion of new features much easier. The interface makes heavy use of JavaScript and AJAX so you’ll find it a lot more responsive than the current interface.
• A big revision to the task processing system which will ensure that updates to tasks and task processing in general will not affect your use of Traffic Android and will also allow some important additions that are planned such as automatic account creation and validating that your account profiles all work.
• The task system revision also means we’re going to be able to put in a lot of new services easily and revise the old ones more easily as well. This means lots more RSS aggregators, new social bookmarking sites, fixes to any existing tasks and new social news sites.
• Once these are done there will be some new RSS features going in, including being able to add your own feeds (other than the one we generate for you) for submission to the aggregators and also the (optional) ability to automatically create and submit campaigns using your blog’s RSS feed(s). This would mean that every time you make a new blog post, Traffic Android could automatically find out about it, pull it down and start bookmarking it for you, or at least do most of the work so all you have to do is check the settings and hit submit. More on this to come.

The Text Spinner

The feature we have in testing is “text spinning”.  It will take effect in all your project and campaign settings once testing proves it to be working as expected. Here’s how it works:

When you enter a title, description or other text, you can use special formatting to have it select random snippets of text to be used which will cause each task that executes to post slightly different content. The more snippets of text you provide, the more variation you can create for content posted to each site.

Example:

Hello, my name is {Jack|Jill|Chris|Kate} and I am {{ten|twenty} years|not|very} {old|young}.

As you can see, the selection of a random name in the snippet is fairly straightforward. The second part of the snippet is a little more complex, but demonstrates how you can embed random selections within other random selections. Some possible outputs for the above string would be:

Hello, my name is Jill and I am twenty years young.
Hello, my name is Jack and I am not old.
Hello, my name is Chris and I am ten years old.