Just noticed that Stephen Downes emailed me about his implementation of a Javascript-based referrer linkback system. I'd been planning to get around to making one inspired from our blogchat, but he's got it first. Cool. :) Looks like Jon's picked up on it, too.

Jon muses:

I haven't yet looked into what it will take to make the reporting item- rather than page-specific. It's doable, I'm sure. Thanks, Stephen! A ?JavaScript-oriented solution like this will appeal to a lot of Radio users.

The biggest issue I see for Radio, obviously, is that the style there is to have many blog entries on one page for the day. Permalinks are anchors within those pages. However, I haven't seen browsers reporting the post-anchor-hash info for referrals. At first though, one would need to have Radio spew blog entries into individual files to make this JS linkback scheme work at per-entry granularity. Otherwise, I'd love to see this work for Radio. I'd also love to see it woven with community server services.

A few brief musings on the referrers script itself:

• Hmm, haven't seen cgi-lib.pl used since my Perl 4 and pre-CGI.pm days. I'd forgotten how serviceable the thing still is.



• I like get_page_title(). It's a start on what I was musing about over here.



• I want to steal this, maybe transliterate it into PHP (since my webhost frowns on my CGIs now), and hook it up to a MySQL database. Stephen doesn't want to host the world's referers, but I wonder how mad my host will get if I open mine up. :) Would make for some neat data to draw maps with, but probably shouldn't do things to make myself an even more annoying band practicing neighbor.