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🦋 Links that know when they are followed

It occurs to me that it might be nice to have links (to outside web sites) that knew when a reader clicked on them, in order to update statistics -- my idea is to sort my blogroll by how frequently each of the links is used. Here is an idea for how to do it: Currently the link is <a href="http://someurl">Link Text</a> -- but if the link were <a href="http://www.readin.com/blog/blog.asp?redirect='someurl'">Link Text</a>, then I could update my statistics and redirect. This might confuse some browsers' site history, causing the back button not to work properly; I'm pretty sure Explorer and Mozilla know what to do when confronted with such a situation but am not sure about earlier versions of Netscape. And I would want to have some Java code for mouseover, so that the browser's status bar would just display someurl when you hovered over the link.

Update: Weird, now (Tuesday) I see someone has browsed to my blog following a link of the type I am describing: my referrals log shows a visit from http://www.popdex.com/redir/?u=http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/000634.html. (The "u" redirect URL is the address of the Koufax Awards thread on Wampum.) Apparently someone followed a self-conscious link to the Koufax Awards, then followed the link on that page to my blog. And for some reason their browser remembered the self-conscious link as the referrer instead of the redirect.

posted afternoon of Monday, December 15th, 2003
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