Monitoring Link Usage

[Thomas Dowling]

Traditionally, of course, collection development takes into account much
more that a total amount of use.  So, caveat caveat caveat, and away we go.

There's no way to detect a browser going from any page (even if it came from
your server) to someone else's server.  Therefore, the way to find out if a
link on one of your pages is being used is to have it point back to your
server.  Typically, for external links, it points to a CGI script at your
end which then redirects the browser to the external site.  So instead of
linking to http://somewhere.else.com/ you point to
http://my.server.edu/cgi-bin/redirect?http://somewhere.else.com/  A minimal
version of /cgi-bin/redirect might be:

#!/usr/bin/ksh
echo "Location: $QUERY_STRING"
echo


Your web server's log should record the complete hit on /cgi-bin/redirect
including the external URL.  You can, of course, have the redirect script
write to a separate log file in case you don't want to filter through the
general log file.

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin L. Gelinson-Zalben <gelinsrl at alverno.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Friday, June 12, 1998 5:34 PM
Subject: Monitoring Link Usage


>
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>This is a bit different monitoring question...
>
>My library has decided to make a rather comprehensive web page..over 150
>links which I need to create into a bunch of web pages.  I have great
>fears that people really won't use these sites, and I will be wasting
>lots of time maintaining this site. So....I'm looking for a way to
>monitor link usage.  I want to know which links are being used, and
>which ones are being ignored.  Does anyone know of such a program?
>
>TIA,
>
>Robin
>