IT question

[skirtyscot]

Easy one for all you IT experts, I should think!

A wee while ago I posted a link to runnj's blog. He spotted the link, joined SC and commented on my link. http://www.skirtcafe.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16056 . This makes me wonder, who can see through a link in reverse like that and find out where it has come from? Any user of the linked site (if they know how to do it!)? Only the owner of the site? Who?

[Zorba]

I get a daily report on my site telling me who's been there (pretty useless) and where they came from (VERY useful!). This can be done on any site you own, and many that aren't owned by you will provide the data too. I've found links to my site on chatboards where the poster was claiming to be me a couple of times and was able to put the kabosh on this activity. The logs also allow me to fine tune my .htaccess file - as a for instance; I don't allow links from Face***k, but it took a bit of tuning to perfect.

[crfriend]

A wee while ago I posted a link to runnj's blog. He spotted the link, joined SC and commented on my link. http://www.skirtcafe.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16056 . This makes me wonder, who can see through a link in reverse like that and find out where it has come from? Any user of the linked site (if they know how to do it!)? Only the owner of the site? Who?

For the most part, it's the folks who have access to the "referrer" portion of the web logs who can see those data. That means that I do, obviously, but it's not something I've thought much about "data-mining".

Up until a few weeks ago I was keeping a running copy of the logs locally on one of my machines, but that machine is now powered off and is awaiting reconnection to the real world. Hopefully that'll happen early sometime next week once I have a better understanding of the local power-budget and how much is available without causing problems.

Sometimes disruptions in life manifest themselves as technology-disruptions as well. At least I have the machine.

[Caultron]

All browsers send the URL of the current page as part of the request for any new page. Web servers can capture this and include it on log records, or programmed Web pages can make other uses of it.

However, this isn't 100% reliable, as Web pages you browse by hand-typing a URL or clicking on a Favorite have no referring page. Therefore, no such information is available.