I have a handy little bookmarklet that posts to the short‘n‘curlies linklog at the top of the front page. It grabs information about the page title, referrer title, and referrer url, and just lets me type in a supposedly funny (or pithy and useful) summary comment before posting. Very handy. However, I’m finding it less and less useful because of one specific problem; the referrer information it picks up is quite often pointing at Bloglines, my RSS aggregator. I don’t read people’s websites any more, especially if they provide full post content in their syndication feeds; I read the posts in Bloglines and follow the links from there directly. So, if I want to make a note of those posts, I have to go and open Bloglines again, select that feed, choose the “show old posts I’ve read” bit to on, follow the permalink to their website, follow the link again to the destination, and then click my bookmarklet again so I can get the right referrer data.
Now, this is hardly a major problem. Sometimes I can’t be bothered to do this, and so I just don’t provide any information about where I got that link from. But Ned (very politely) pulled me up on that once (and rightly so) so I don’t like doing it. (Getting credit for being the person before me to copy the link of someone else (arf, arf) is hardly a major thing, but it’s a reasonable thing to do nonetheless).
So, how can I solve that?
And this is Referrers being missed, written , and concerning Uncategorized
Comments
Paul
Aquarion
My solution to this was to grab the referer when I put it into the db, like this:
javascript:
link=window.location;
title=window.prompt(link+'\nTitle?',document.title);
comment=window.prompt(link+'\n'+title+'\nComment?');
referer=window.prompt(link+'\n'+title+'\n'+comment+'\nReferrer?',document.referrer);
document.location='http://www.aquarionics.com/path/to/adminstuff/linkthis.php?url='+escape(link)+'&title='+escape(title)+'&comment='+escape(comment);
On the one hand, I include the referrer (Although I don't currently display it), on the other I can modify it as I want to. On the downside, it's going to link to whichever bloglines thing you used.
Aquarion
In case that doesn't make sense, the backend code that deals with that is at http://www.aquarionics.com/showcode/misc/linkthis.php
sil
Ah, that's the issue: that the referrer is Bloglines rather than the source of the RSS feed. I get the referrer (and the referrer title) in an editable form, so I can fiddle with them, but the referrer isn't the one I want.
I suppose i could hack the referrer fetch page (it runs a server-side thing to fetch the referrer page, so I can get a title from it) to check if the referrer is a Bloglines page and if so go looking for the link I followed and then work out the real referrer, but that sounds amazingly hard, and I have to hardcode my Bloglines login details into the server-side script, too.
I'll think about it...
Diowania
Adorei este site!
Se nao fosse por ele nao consegueria fazer um
trabalho escolar muito importante
para mim e minhas companheiras de grupo.
Acho que o site tb devia falar sobre a politica turca e os
transgenicos nesse pais!
Congratulacoes,
Diowania.
I would if I could, but feel less inclined to in a linklog. In the main weblog, I would always try to inform the reader of the referrer, but my linklog stuff usually comes from the news, my own surfing, or someone else's linklog where they never give out a source (anil etc). I haven't got the skills atm to write such a bookmarklet anyway, so an stuck with something that doesn't provide referrers anyway.
That said, I wouldn't get into your situation, because I don't use bloglines in the same way as you. If it is something worth reading more of, or commenting on, or linking, I will open up the page itself in a new tab and bookmark it.