Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

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Re: Strange URLs

Author:	Gary Teter
Posted:	6/26/1999; 11:32:27 AM
Topic:	scriptingNews outline for 6/26/99
Msg #:	7834 (In response to 7832)
Prev/Next:	7833 / 7835

Not sure exactly what wired does with that, but cnet has a similar scheme, which was described in an interview I can't find right now.

One of their webmasters noticed that adding a string like "?st.ne.fd.tohhed.ni" at the end of a URL didn't confuse their webserver, and so they use it to identify which particular link a user clicked to get to the story identified by the first part of the URL.

They can grep their logs to find out which links people are using more than others, and have apparently used this information in their recent redesign. ("No one clicks on those little graphic headlines so let's get rid of 'em...")

I think it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen, so naturally when mailing out a news.com URL I replace the ? part with a code of my own devising... :-)

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