You have a blog. You have stats telling you how many people read it. You post links. But do you have something telling you how many people click on your links ?<\/p>\n
Here is it : I'm releasing my latest plugin, Click Counter<\/strong>. Basically, it adds a click counter to links in your posts, as in these examples : Less basically, it comes with a real bunch of options you'll probably never need to tweak, but I wanted to do something as flexible and usable as I could. Current version<\/strong> : 1.02<\/p>\n Note<\/strong> : you may find sometimes this plugin disabled here on my own server, when I'm tweaking a few things. The plugin is fully functionnal anyway, download it :-)<\/p>\n Note<\/strong>: The plugin is rather well commented, advanced users can probably directly download, edit and run. I'd suggest reading the "How it works" and "Tips & Tricks" sections anyway.<\/p>\n You need a new table in your WordPress database, named wp_linkclicks<\/strong> (you can modify the name, be sure then to edit the beginning of the plugin properly) Create this table with the following query :<\/p>\n Newbie tips<\/strong> : first, install PHPMyAdmin<\/a> on your website. This is a great interface for anything you can do with MySQL databases. Once it's done, look for the "SQL" link in the menu : click, and paste in the textbox the above code. It will set up the required table for you.<\/p>\n The archive contains the tracker file, go.php<\/em> : put this file in your blog root. If for some reason you want to modify the tracker file name, be sure to properly edit the beginning of the plugin script as well.<\/p>\n In its default configuration, the plugin needs nothing more. Get back to your blog and post as usual. It will silently add trackers to links in your posts and links in commenters' posts.<\/p>\n A small warning<\/strong> : adding a counter to a link "costs" one SQL query. If you are hosted on a slow server, or if you are teh ultimate linkblogger<\/em> with 200 external links posted in your frontpage \u00e0 la <\/em>Metafilter, you might slightly overload your SQL server :) If this is your case, read by the end of this article the Tips & Tricks, I'll explain how to add a "silent tracker with no SQL query".<\/p>\n Another small warning<\/strong> : the plugin works with proper xhtml syntax, that is href="url"<\/strong> or class="myclass"<\/strong> (quotes), not href=url <\/strong>or class=myclass <\/strong>(no quotes)<\/p>\n Don't change anything to your posting habits, the plugin is the "install & forget" type.<\/p>\n When your WordPress will print a post with a link, the plugin replaces every link target and title. For example :<\/p>\n becomes<\/p>\n The number of clicks in the title value will be added to an existing title if specified : title="this is a cool link (XX clicks)"<\/em><\/p>\n When someone clicks on this modified link, it will add or update the following values to the table you've created earlier :<\/p>\n Unless stated otherwise, only external links will have a counter added, because it's pointless to track how many people click on your pages. There are stats plugins for this :) I've written two "template tags" you can add to your pages<\/p>\n As you can see, the first one, wp_ozh_click_topclicks<\/strong>, has 3 optionnal arguments :<\/p>\n The pattern parameter is an html string with template tags. The default value, as defined in the plugin, is :<\/p>\n Tags are enclosed in between "%%" and can be :<\/p>\n If the target page has no title, and is html content, the title will be replaced by the url itself. In this case, %%link_title%% will output the url, shortened by its trailing slash and leading http:\/\/www.<\/em> if applicable.<\/p>\n It the page has no title because it's not an html document (http:\/\/site.com\/somefile.zip <\/em>for example), it will be replaced by the document name (somefile.zip<\/em>)<\/p>\n Now, I'll go through all the variables and their default values you can modify and edit at the beginning of the script. For the interested only, most users don't need so much tweaking and are probably bored of reading this page :) Core variables :<\/p>\n $wp_ozh_click['table'] = 'wp_linkclicks'<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['file'] = get_settings('siteurl') . "\/go.php"<\/strong> Basic features :<\/p>\n $wp_ozh_click['track_all_links'] = 1<\/strong> The value count<\/em>will be removed at processing time, so output will be valid html. $wp_ozh_click['in_title'] = 1<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['in_plain'] = 0<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['0click'] = 'No click'<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['1click'] = 'One hit'<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['clicks'] = '%% hits'<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['method'] = 2<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['do_posts'] = 1<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['do_comments'] = 1<\/strong> Now onto the link title features :<\/p>\n $wp_ozh_click['get_title'] = 0<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['get_title_forcerefresh'] = 50<\/strong> $wp_ozh_click['extensions'] = array ( lots of extensions <\/em>)<\/strong> Then, top link features :<\/p>\n $wp_ozh_click['top_limit'] = 5<\/strong>
\nI love WordPress<\/a>, WordPress<\/a> and WordPress<\/a>.
\nClick on one link and reload the page (hit counter displayed on mouseover link title, in plain text, or both)<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\nSet up the MySQL table<\/h2>\n
\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\n\tInstall<\/h2>\n
\nozh-click-counter.zip<\/a>
\nExtract and upload to your blog, preserving directory structure if any.
\nNote: download counter here and stats on wordpress.org may differ and reflect the number of downloads before this plugin was hosted on the plugin directory<\/small>\n<\/div>\nUse the plugin<\/h2>\n
How it works<\/h2>\n
\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\n\t
\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\n\t\n
\nSo, if you want to add a counter to an internal file, put a absolute path in the link html : href="http:\/\/site\/blog\/file" instead of href="file"<\/p>\nTemplate Tags<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\n\t\n
Optionnal configuration tweaking<\/h2>\n
\nNote <\/strong>: as usual, I've named the plugin file, functions and vars with a beginning "wp_ozh_click" to prevent any nuclear world war.<\/p>\n
\nName of the table where stats will be stored<\/p>\n
\nName and location of the tracker file<\/p>\n
\nValue can be 1 or 0
\nIf set to 1, every link will have a tracker. Just post as usual.
\nIf set to 0, you will have to specify when you want to add a tracker, with the following code :<\/p>\n
\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\n\t
\nThe value of count can be : 1, title, inline, or a mix.<\/p>\n\n
\nValue can be 1 or 0
\nDefault behaviour for displaying counter (according to $wp_ozh_click['track_all_links'] or to count value in the link html). If set to one, display hit number in link title.<\/p>\n
\nValue can be 1 or 0
\nDefault behaviour for displaying counter (according to $wp_ozh_click['track_all_links'] or to count value in the link html). If set to one, display hit number in plain text after the link.<\/p>\n
\nDefault text for zero click<\/p>\n
\nDefault text for one click<\/p>\n
\nDefault text for several clicks, where %% will be replaced by a number<\/p>\n
\nValue can be 1, 2 or 3.
\nThere are 3 ways to modify the link html to add the tracker. Each has advantages and drawbacks, but all validate any Doctype up to XHTML 1.1. If you want things to remain simple, just skip this setting and leave its default value
\nDepending on the chosen method, <a href="http:\/\/site.com"> will become :<\/p>\n\n
<a href="http:\/\/site.com" onclick="window.location='\/go.php?http:\/\/site.com'; return false">
Cool : status bar shows real link without further trick.
Less cool : doesnt work with "open link in new window"<\/li>\n
<a href="\/yourblog\/go.php?http:\/\/site.com">
Cool : works with "open in new window" and doesn't require Javascript enabled
Less cool : shows ugly link "\/blog\/go.php?http:\/\/site.com" in status bar<\/li>\n
like method 2 but also modifies status bar to hide the ugly and sometimes annoying "yoursite.com\/blog\/go.php?" part with onmouseover="javascript:window.status='http:\/\/site.com'; return false"
Cool : status bar shows real link.
Less cool : adds a few bytes of html<\/li>\n
\nValue can be 1 or 0 :
\nDo you want to add a counter to links in your posts ?<\/p>\n
\nValue can be 1 or 0 :
\nDo you want to add a counter to links in your commenters comments ?<\/p>\n
\nValue can be 1 or 0.
\nGet remote page title the first time a user clicks a link to store it along with hits in the table. This will slow down the first clicker, by 1 or 2 seconds maximum, time for your website to retrieve the distant page and parse it.
\nNote : mostly untested feature. It uses fopen()<\/a>, check your host has enabled this (if not, the plugin will work anyway, and title will simply be empty)<\/p>\n
\nValue is an integer.
\nRefresh remote page title every XX clicks. Set to 0 if you don't want to use this feature. If you chose to use it, the higher traffic – then clicks – you get, the higher you should set this. Examples : 50 for Joe's blog, 3000 for Slashdottish blog.
\nTo be honest this is really a gadget – almost totally useless :)<\/p>\n
\nMost common non html file extensions. These are files that have no title html tag, so their link title will be the file name (somefile.zip for example)<\/p>\n
\nDefault number of top links to be displayed by wp_ozh_click_topclicks()<\/strong> (see above, Template Tags)<\/p>\n