---
title: "New and Improved! Now with nearly ubiquitous referral links"
date: 2002-04-19T14:08:14-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2002/04/19/oooaoi/
author: Les Orchard
---

# New and Improved! Now with nearly ubiquitous referral links

<p>Well, I bit the bullet and pitched in the extra bucks to upgrade my hosting which, among other things, finally gave me an <code>access_log</code>.  The first thing I did was install <a href="http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/">Webalizer</a> <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/stats/">over here</a>.  Should my access log reports not be public?  Hmm.  Well they are for now, if that becomes a problem, I'll put a password on it.</p>
<p>The second thing I did was attempt to copy the <a href="http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/linkback.html">Disenfranchised linkback act</a> and make a wiki and <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/SSI">SSI</a> includable referers widget, which I'm calling <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/ShowReferers">ShowReferers</a>.  Mine's not quite so slick as their implementation, since with theirs you can construct your links to refer to paragraph numbers in a page so that a link back to you is injected right there on their refered-to page.  </p>
<p>The neat thing here, though, is that I stuck it into the view template for <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome">DecafbadWiki</a> so that every wiki page will show referral links, if there are any.  I also dropped it into the pages for each story on the weblog.  (Which reminds me that I need to make the story pages nicer, since I hardly ever look at them but the referrals tell me that other people see them more.)</p>
<p>I didn't quite get the value of referral links before, but I do now. :)</p>
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