Waxy.org is the sandbox of Occasionally, there's an idea so simple and powerful that you have to drop whatever you're doing and implement it immediately.
Yesterday, I read the Jon Udell article that's making the rounds (via Mefi and Flutterby). I didn't immediately grok it, but seeing it in action (1, 2, 3) did the trick.
Visually, I was inspired by Mark Pilgrim's concise display, but didn't want to periodically parse through my Apache logs. I wanted real-time results without limiting myself to one particular web server log format. So I wrote a Perl script that's now included on every entry page via SSI, using flat files to store the data.
As a result, there may be some issues with scalability on heavily trafficked sites, but I'd think most weblogs wouldn't have a problem. Anyway, if you want to try it, all it requires is Perl, server-side includes, and a world-writable directory to store the files in. Download Waxy Backlinks now. Installation info inside.
Installation is pretty easy, so long as you know your way around a Unix shell.
1. Rename the file from backlink.txt to backlink.cgi.
2. Save the file to a directory readable by your web server and make it executable (e.g. 'chmod 755 backlink.cgi')
3. Create a directory to store the cache files in and make it world-writable (e.g. 'chmod 777 backlink_dir/')
4. Edit line 16 of backlink.cgi, changing the '$backlinkdir' directory to point to your own cache directory.
5. Add the following server-side include to your .shtml file(s), where you want the backlinks to be displayed:
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi/backlink.cgi" -->
That's it! If you'd like, you can optionally customize the display by changing the header, footer, and backlink HTML in the script. If you get stuck, I might be able to help.
4:53 PM
Hmm, I think I need to add a couple features to the script. The ability to set a maximum number of links to display, a minimum threshold of visitors to display, and the option to group recent links by top-level domain. As you can see, it doesn't take long before the list of links gets unruly.
10:19 PM
This is super cool: I may clone it to track user agents the same way (keep an eye on robots vs real readers). I seem to be showing up in my own backlinks, even though I added myself to the "blacklist."
10:40 PM
Are you correctly adding your hostname to the @blacklist array? Try changing it to read something like:
my @blacklist = qw($ENV{HTTP_HOST} subdomain.example.com);
5:36 PM
Hi. Found this in a Mefi post which I found through google. Is this Perl script possible to implement on a PHP site. My pages are *.php, so I don't think I can run SSI on a php page. Thanks!
6:04 PM
I'd recommend using Phil Ringnalda's PHP port of my Backlink script, or this newer version of my script.
5:19 AM
Would you please help me to find out why the back link does not work?
http://www.alphatheme.com/b/archives/000008.shtml
I did try with and SSI works.
The path is also seems correct.
my $backlinkdir = '/home/virtual/site1/fst/var/www/cgi-bin/mt/backlink';
The code was:
I got an error so I did change it to:
I don't know what else should I check?
THX
2:04 PM
I don't have any idea ... it just don't works.
on my indexpage it looks like:
[...]
echo $display;
?>
backlink.cgi looks like:
my $backlinkdir = '/usr/local/httpd/htdocs/kunden/web121/html/public/backlink';
php = 0
www.feiern-events.com
8:58 PM
Interesting, I'm gonna try this script...