What method would be best for doing this

[Anon]

On my site it lists links to other sites. I want the user to be able to click a button to mark any site they have visited. From then on a small icon will load up next to that link whenever they visit that page again.

I was thinking maybe I should use cookies to store which sites have been visited/marked (using site ID's which I could then check up using PHP against a MySQL database). But the user might end up marking hundreds of sites, would the cookie get too big in that case? Should I be looking at another way of doing this?

any help is appreciated
thanks -rich

[miasma]

This sound fine to me... althought I haven't really done anything like it before. I believe this is how most forums do "unread" type of markings, every message you read you store it in a cookie, then when you list all the messages you check against the cookie list. Those that are not there get an unread flag.

[knickerlas]

Hi
You might use the cookie as a key to info on the DB avoiding info loss.
Your next worry is 'what about users with cookies disabled?'

Nick

[Anon]

You could introduce an 'intermediate' script...

Rather than each of your links poiting to the other sites URL, you could point to a php script (on your site), with the URL of the external site in the query string. The php script can then log (to a text file, database, etc) the user and the name/id of the site, and then redirect the user (using header("Location: ...")) to the actual site.

Of course, this would mean:
a) that the user would actually have to visit the site before it is flagged, they couldn't just flag multiple links in one go

b) That you would need to identify the user for subsequent visits, so that the log you keep can be referenced by some unique method. To do this, I guess you could either store some kind of unique id in a cookie, or introduce a login/password mechanism.

Maybe a bit too complicated for what you want?

Of course, the easiest alternative is to declare a CSS that formats a:visited links differently...

Dan

[Anon]

Hmm that's clever thinking. My only problem with that is it would take up a lot of webspace which I don't have money for right now. Definately something I might do in the future though.

Can you tell me- does CSS keep links as "visited" permanently, until the cache is cleared, or per-session?

[Anon]

Hmm, yes, the CSS method depends on the browser cache of the user, so that wouldn't really work, for long term use...