dive into mark

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 one at DECAFBAD, 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.

The list of referrers is sorted by the number of visitors each referrer has drawn, and you only need one to make it onto the list There is some attempt made to screen out search engines, bogus referrers, or referrers that no longer link to me for some reason. (The purpose of this is to track conversations and rewards links; people who link to me and then remove the link do not deserve to be rewarded. You know who you are.)

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.

Later: BlahStuff asks if I’m limiting referrers. No. Anyone who honestly links to a specific post or day, and has at least one person (including themself) click through, should show up in the list. There is a delay, because the list is only rebuilt once an hour.

And no, I don’t anticipate the list overwhelming my content. Most days I only get a handful of referrers linking to specific posts; the vast majority of my referrers are people linking to my home page. (This ratio actually surprised me.) Also, the list intentionally only includes referrals from the past few days, so each day’s list should eventually dwindle to nothing over time.

I’m considering extending the concept to include a “Currently being read by” blogroll that lists people linking to my home page, but I haven’t implemented it yet. This is not an original idea either.

Keith Devens wonders how it works. First, my Apache access logs are piped through chronolog, so I have one log file per day. I have a script that runs once an hour that parses through recent log files and creates my statistics page. At the same time, it now creates linkback HTML files, one for each day. The linkback file for 20 April 2002 would be http://diveintomark.org/stats/linkbacks/20020420 (although it’s empty by now because I only keep each file for 5 days). The Python script that creates the linkbacks file uses the built-in urllib module to load the referring page and check for an honest link. Finally, my MovableType template uses server-side includes to include the linkback file after each day’s posts; this means I don’t need to rebuild my page to see new referrers.

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