Keith Devens .com

Automatic linkbacks

Very very cool new feature on http://diveintomark.org/: Automatic Linkbacks.

I've added a new feature to the home page of my weblog: automatic linkbacks to people who are linking to specific posts. This was inspired by a similar system at disenchanted.com, and satisfies the scalability problem I described with my site statistics page, which is now so unweildy that I can no longer use it for its original purpose, to track conversations.

That's awesome. I'm interested in how he set the system up. Does a script run with each page hit, or does a script run once an hour or so and track new hits? How's the db (if there is one) set up? If there's no db, is it just a separate file for each post containing the links and hitcount? How is this whole thing integrated with MovableType? Finally, how does he check if a site no longer links to him? I suppose he must scan the linking site for his url, but I wonder how often he does that. If the referrer is from a weblog on someone's homepage, that link will scroll off the homepage eventually, for instance.

Update... his list of links isn't updating in real time, so it has to be some script that runs. I wonder how often... does it have to go through his entire server log each time? Those logs can get really big, and it might be a resource hog if you're running something which analyzes the whole thing every half-hour.

And... "This system still allows for communication by referrer, if you have enough control over your DNS. This should not be construed as an invitation to mischief." I think I'm going to try this... mwa ha ha. (No mischief... don't worry).

Tony Bowden makes a comparison between this and the feature common in Wikis where the title of a wiki page is a link that brings you to a page showing all the 'backlinks' to that page - in other words, you can get a list of all pages within the wiki that link to that page. I had thought of doing something similar on a local scale with my weblog, so for every post I could show a list of posts that link back to that post. In other words, followups to that post. Mark took it one step further to show global (Internet-wide) links!

Tony also has a good summary of how webloggers communicate. One more method he forgot: if you have a comments feature, people often leave messages there .

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19:04 (utc-4)
edited: 2002-04-21 02:37 (utc-4)