Page re-direct

bailey · 16-01-2004 10:55am #1

I wanted to set up multiple banners on the same site all linking to my site, to get an idea of what banners are being clicked more often I was going to link each to a different page that I will specially create - this page will then automatically redirect to my home page and my plan is then just to monitor how often the specific URLs are requested.

Do you know of any quick methods of getting the page to redirect to the home page before they know what is going on?

Thanks

seamus · 16-01-2004 11:30am

Easy enough.

I have something similar on my site which counts the amount of times a link is clicked.

There are two ways you can do it. The first doesn't involve a redirect. You put a little bit if code at the start of your home page which checks to see if a GET variable is set, say 'id' and increment a counter based on the value of variable. So then for each banner ad you just have a different value for id in the link, e.g www.mypage.com/index.php?id=4

Redirects are just as simple, and probably better for getting a more accurate idea of clickthrough rates. For the previous one, people can hover over your ad, see your site's url and go "Oh, I've been there", etc. If they don't know where it brings them, they might click just to check.
So if you just write a small script (e.g. in PHP) which counts that the link has been clicked, and then redirects to your home page without outputting any data. So in PHP, there is function "header(location: www.mypage.com/)" which redirects the browser to the correct page. You can check any data and increment any counters before the browser is redirected, so for example, your ad links to "www.myadserver.com/link.php?id=4", the link.php script counts that ad 4 was clicked, then redirects the browser to your home page. Most other languages used for web apps have equivalent header output functions that let you redirect without outputting any actual data.

You could use meta redirects for the above, but they involve having to load an entire page and wait for a refresh, and they may also not work in some browsers. Using header redirects means that the client needs not download any extra pages, and has a much smaller delay than a meta redirect.

bailey · 16-01-2004 12:40pm

Thanks for the help Seamus, but i seem to be doing something wrong.

I have a link pointing to a black php page with this in the header (<?php
header("Location: http://www.example.com/"); ?>) but each time I click on the link, instead of redirecting the page it prompts me to open the php document?

clearz · 16-01-2004 12:45pm

Are you setting the content type of the document to text/html

seamus · 16-01-2004 12:48pm

Originally posted by bailey
Thanks for the help Seamus, but i seem to be doing something wrong.

I have a link pointing to a black php page

I assume you mean blank page? There should be no output to the browser except for the header() function, i.e. no "<HTML><HEAD>......" etc.

with this in the header (<?php
header("Location: http://www.example.com/"); ?>) but each time I click on the link, instead of redirecting the page it prompts me to open the php document?

Sounds like the webserver you'e running isn't set up to preprocess php pages. What server are you running?

bailey · 16-01-2004 1:20pm

At the moment I have Apache PHP triad running on my PC and I am just trying to test it

seamus · 16-01-2004 1:22pm

As clearz said, try setting the content type to text/html.

Also if you download the page does it give you html or the php source (could just be a browser issue)?

bailey · 16-01-2004 1:33pm

it gives me the PHP source, where do I specify the content type to text/html

seamus · 16-01-2004 2:00pm

Originally posted by bailey
it gives me the PHP source, where do I specify the content type to text/html

You can force it using the same header() function, eg
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1");

But you probably don't need to - the content-type header is a directive to tell the browser to display it as text, as opposed to displaying it as a picture, or downloading it as a zip file. The directive has nothing to do with processing the PHP file on the server side.

I'm not sure tbh.

Newbie Question: You have the php file on the webserver, and not in a local directory? I.e. Your accessing http://localhost/link.php as opposed to c:\www\link.php? (You can never be sure what's been overlooked)

bailey · 16-01-2004 2:11pm

got it working now, put it down to friday stupidity - thanks for all the help

Page re-direct

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