READIN

Thursday, July first, 2004

🦋 New Feature

I got the "Referrals" section in the left hand column working, I had been meaning to do it for a while now, I think it's pretty cool. Tim, if you surf over here today you will see a bunch of referrals from your site; this is because I was using your site as a test.

The Referrals section should show: any referrals from another site within the past day and a half. If the site is a search engine, then the link text will show the search engine name and what the query was; otherwise the link text will just show the host name of the site. (One drawback to this is, multiple referrals from different pages on the same site will be glommed together into one link, with the link pointing to whichever page sent the first referral. This doesn't seem like a huge big deal to me in the case of sites which are not search engines; it is why I handle search engines differently.)

Also I moved "Daily Links" (when there are any) to the top of the left hand column.

Update: The routine that distinguishes between search engine referrals and other referrals does not currently handle Excite Search, which builds its URL in an unusual way -- I will try and figure out how to handle this, but until then referrals from Excite (and any other search engines which work the same way) will be displayed as non-search engine referrals.

posted afternoon of Thursday, July first, 2004: Respond

Monday, July 12th, 2004

Hmm.. I see that displaying referrals from search engines in the way that I am doing it, is having a negative side effect of causing the engines to catalog the link text I am showing, and direct searchers to the wrong place. I will turn that feature off tonight. Too bad, I got a kick out of seeing what people were searching for -- but far be it from me to make people's Google experience more frustrating than need be. Update: Done.

posted evening of Monday, July 12th, 2004: Respond