[Theforum] Referrers (was: New feature suggestions)

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Thu Nov 15 16:52:26 CST 2001


At 04:06 AM 11/16/2001, Martin wrote:
>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>

At CNET, we used to have an extremely complicated system for tracking how 
people arrived at pages. For example, a URL like:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7890122.html?tag=mn_hd

The "tag" at the end of the URL means that it came from the main page and 
from a text headline.

Could we do this for our articles? Using Martin's example,
<http://evolt.org/article/Search_Engine_Friendly_URLs_Part_II/17/17171/index.html?tag=sigia-l>

This would show up in our logs too, right? And would maintain readable URLs.

Madhu
(who's bloody annoyed that "referrer" got misspelt as "referer" and made it 
to the W3C HTTP standard)

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net





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