Need Conceptual Help to Design Link Tracker

jalperin

I want to build a PHP application that will track how often users click on embedded page links. Instead of hard-coding links to specific pages, I want to be able to change the destination quickly by making changes in a mySQL database of the links.

Here's the approach I'm considering:

Embed link with form http://www.mypage.com/catcher.php?L=[link number]
Create mySQL table with columns for link number and URL to forward to
Write a PHP script, catcher.php that takes parameter L from the incoming URL, looks up the corresponding URL and then uses the <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" tag to send users to that page.

The possible problems I see with this approach are:

It requires a database look-up every time a user clicks. I don't know if PHP/mySQL is fast enough if there's any sort of load.
The <META Refresh method of forwarding people along seems kind of kludgy.

Are there better approaches using PHP/mySQL? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Christopher_Daw

I like the idea of having the links in the table along with the uid, but why not have the html page inside the database table? This would mean the link actually returned the html, alternatively you could specify the filename in the table and then get the script to read the file and write it out again?

Christopher

eoghain

I built something like this awhile back. What I did was create a script called go.php and called that with a url=www.123.com parameter. When go.php loaded it quickly sent out a header("Location: " $url); command and then continued to log the site.

<?php
   header("Location: " $url);
   flush();

   // Code to save the url the user went to.
?>

By using the Location header the user wasn't delayed very long, and there browser was able to go get the new page without waiting for my code to finish.

jalperin

I didn't know about the Location header. Is it documented somewhere?

eoghain

It's a part of the W3C specification for HTTP. I don't remember where I ran across it first, but it's a better way that the refresh tag. The browser will follow it immediately and you users probably won't even see your redirected pages URL in the address bar. Also if they hit back they shouldn't go to your redirector page, but to the page where they hit the link.