URL Redirects with CGI.pm

URL Redirects with CGI.pm

Abstract

Links are cool. Links allow users to browse through information easily. Links make the Web work. Links are also the most confounded, annoying, hard to change, and mostly brain dead things to maintain. While we won't be covering link management techniques in this article, we will learn how to track external link hits. More specifically, we will develop a redirect script that will allow us to track when users click a link that takes them to an external site.

Required Modules

For redirect.pl to work on your system, you should have a recent version of Perl installed, 5.003 or better. You will also need the LWP bundle installed.

To install LWP on a *nix system, type:
perl -MCPAN -e "install LWP"

If you're using a win32 machine (Win95/98/NT) and you have a recent installation of Activestate Perl, you already have LWP on your system. If you don't have a recent version, visit https://www.activestate.com

Web Log Analysis

Web log analysis is the benchmark that gives us all kinds of good information and answers important questions such as:

• Does our Web site suck?
• Where does our Web site suck the most?
• What is the optimal time period to run our Quake II server?

One important thing the log doesn't give us is what external links people are clicking on. For example, on the Mother of Perl page, I have a link to www.perl.com, but I have no way to track how many people are clicking on that link. This causes a problems for Webmasters and marketeers alike.

redirect.pl Get the source This script lets you track when users visit external links.