I’ve changed a few backend things here at w-g, but the only change y’all should notice is that you need to reset your cookie when leaving a comment. Just re-type your info and check the “Re-save cookie” box before submitting. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Update: Actually, there’s something else you might notice. I’ve implemented backlinking on all the archived posts of this site. This means that whenever you link to one of my permanent posts (and someone actually uses that link), an automatic link back to your site will be created. (See it in action here.) There’s a Metafilter discussion about this and what it means to “blogspace”. I’m not sure what I think of all that; I just thought it would be an interesting experiment. We’ll see what happens, eh?
4 responses
How the heck does the bloglinking work? Is it a javascript?
I think there are a lot of different ways to do it (check the MeFi discussion for more), but since I wanted to keep track of visits from each link, I’ve just built it into my blogging system (which uses PHP and a MySQL database). Basically, there’s a little bit of code on all the archive pages that checks the incoming referrer (PHP has a nice little variable for it) and makes sure it isn’t from a search engine or my own site or whatever. Then it checks to see if it’s already in the database. If it is, the visits count gets incremented by one. If it isn’t, it gets added. In my admin site, I have a way to see all the recent referrers and then edit the information: put in a better link (since sometimes it comes from a homepage of a blog instead of the person’s archive page), enter a title, and possibly even a comment.
Like I said, it’s an interesting experiment. There are still some bugs to be worked out. For instance, I keep getting hits from Fredo’s main page, but I want to record those as from his permanent page. So I have to keep editing them by hand. There’s got to be a way to automate that. I’ll figure it out eventually… 🙂
Bill – here‘s a site with instructions for doing it with javascript. He’ll even host it for you if you want!
Ah cool. I just migrated over to Movable Type today, and they have a new backlinking type feature called TrackBack or somesuch. It’s only for MT blogs right now, but it’s just a ping-ing and so should be able to implemented by other systems. I think?