For the first time in a while and especially since the regime change at work I have felt a sense of accomplishment at the weeks end. As we go into the weekend looking back at this week’s task I set out to do and what got done there are several W in my column.
First W of the week was setting up an automated task to pull in data from a web fill out form and apply it to updating a database. I have 12 such websites and have had one connected since August with the help of class Claude code. Monday I had the second one done. Wednesday I looked at two other forms and again with the help of Claude code now have them automated and pulling in new submissions and updating various databases.
Thursday I finally sat down and approached a problem with my companies lead gen system. We have 100+ website with full forms that collect data and pass it directly into Salesforce. Problem is that we have no clue who’s filling out the form and which rep should get this lead. And MORE OFTEN THAN NOT the person filling out the form is already in Salesforce. So my idea was to write a plugin (WordPress runs all out sites) that firsts asks for the visitors email. Next with that email it hits the Salesforce API and searches for a direct match on the email and if found returns the info about the visitor and account id (company) and owner id (sales rep assigned to company). If no email match is found the. The domain of the email is used to search the account object in SFDC for match account and if one is found send back the company info account id and owner id. With data sent back the form is then populated with that information and the visitor is required to give some additional info that we don’t store on Salesforce to submit and eventually get access to the info on our sites.
Again with the help of Claude I had 99% of the system build between 9 am and 4pm. When planning for deployment on the sites the realization that I would have to add in 100+ URLs into my Salesforce app made me question how other plugins like Gravity Forms do it where there isn’t a user setup app. Quick peek at their code I realized that they are using a unique URL as a proxy and run all oauth request through this URL. That way when a new user connects to SFDC they don’t need to enter in customer keys or secrets.
I did have a slight wtf moment and called a better dev than myself to use him as a sounding board. Slowly realizing that if someone were to breach the URL there’s a shot load of SSO credentials sitting there for the taking. Unless I’m totally missing something… As I might be.
So tomorrow I will be creating a proxy system so I can connect all 100 sites without having to enter 100 URLs into my at app at SFDC.
Then late in the day Thursday I was about to back trace an email deliberately issue one of our brands was having. The head of audience development noticed that one of our lists was well below 10% open rate when normally they should be over 40%. He reached out to another dev to look into it who pinged me to see if I could figure anything out.
I checked Google postmaster tools for the brand having issues and noticed that they domain reputation had tanked since December 22. Between that mailing and the next it went from high to medium. Then again on January 16th another noise dive from medium to low which is where it is today. All emails being sent via that domain we being flagged as spam.
Using the two dates as clues I checked all emails sent by this brand on those dates and it winds up that on those two mailings the email copy was intended for brand A however the audience they sent to was brand B a very different niche. There were a handful of complaints and spam reports but an awful lot of unsubs. The complaints are what did the reputation in. Out of 40k emails 2 complaints dropped the reputation a whole level. Each bad making had 2 and now the brand’s domain reputation is tanked. While not a great thing it was satisfying know I helped solve wtf was going on. No AI here though I did ask Gemini wtf it’s coworker Gmail was doing
