[Theforum] New feature suggestions

[Martin]

Daniel J. Cody wrote on 15/11/01 10:09 pm

>we should have a person or people that do advocate evolt articles
>and stuff. its usually been up to the individual author to do so, but
>every time i've seen someone do it, its produced incredible responses in
>terms of interest in evolt and new members.

There's a lot of that (and it's good), but there's also a bit of "this
discussion topic needs a bit of that old evolt magic", and a link
is posted (and that's good too). Rudy's done a lot of that, and Bob
post a link to Adrian's font sizing article to SIG-IA (3500 or
so members). I did the same the other day for Garrett's PHP
interpretation of our SSURL scheme.

There is one problem with posting links to lists - the referer
won't log the source. So here's a way round it: the SSURL
contains the article title, but that bit of the URL isn't actually
used for anything but readability. So what you can do is
change:
<http://evolt.org/article/Search_Engine_Friendly_URLs_Part_II/17/17171/inde
x.html>
to
<http://evolt.org/article/sig-ia/17/17171/index.html> or
whatever, so when the log analysis comes in, you can still pinpoint
the source of the visitors, but from the URL, not the referers.

There is one downside to this - you lose the readability of
the URL, but if you've introduced it well enough, it won't
matter. And in any case, it's no worse than the Amazon
URL scheme - can anyone tell me what
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0718144848/ref=ed_best_h_b_2/026-
0586069-1935621>
is? You could probably have a guess if you're a bookseller
because the number after ASIN is the ISBN (which is
categorised data), but not otherwise. (Amazon also
use a SSURL schema).

Of course if I were a *truly* evil Director of Propaganda,
I'd demand tracking from source to registration, so that I could
identify the most fruitful source of new members...

Cheers
Martin

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