Displaying your Counted Clicks

Wed, Dec 12, 2007

After reading Mads blog entry on counting clicks on external links I decided to create a web control that would display the information in a nice package. I also wanted to clean up the process to eliminate having to add the long string of Javascript on each link. So first I set out to reconfigure the structure and this is what I came up with for the head section:

   1:  <script type="text/javascript">

   2:  <!--

   3:       function trackclick(element)

   4:            { if(element.href.indexOf('redirect.ashx')==-1)

   5:                 element.href='redirect.ashx?url='+element.href }

   6:  // -->

   7:  </script>

Then it’s just a matter of inserting the appropriate onclick="trackclick(this)" for the anchor tags I want to monitor. For example you could add a tracker for <a href="http://blog.madskristensen.dk" onclick="trackclick(this)">.NET Slave</a>

Okay, great… Now I need to either connect to ~/redirect.ashx?stats=true to see the results or manually look at the ~/app_code/redirector.xml file. The problem is that I like to look at this info remotely, and connecting to the redirect.ashx doesn’t integrate with my theme. So now lets talk about a custom control to display the information…

Being that this was my first control I decided to steal the structure from one of the many controls that are included in Blogengine.net, specifically the tagcloud.cs file. Using the code from Mads redirect.ashx file I was able to parse out the necessary pieces and re-write the new control file to display the content the way I wanted it to look like.

After getting the control working correctly I added it to my site and gave it a spin.

   1:  <% if (Page.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated){ %>

   2:    <h2>Click Tracker</h2>

   3:    <blog:RedirectStats ID="RedirectStats" runat="server" />

   4:  <%} %>

Oops, I have a narrow sidebar, so having the three columns that is the default view wouldn’t work. So I cut it down to the address and a count. Now it looks nice and I can see what’s going on with my site from any remote location…