I’ve been reading what some people have been thinking and doing about referers and backlinking:

• http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/linkback.html
• http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/05/03/udell.html
• http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/04/20.html#automatic_linkbacks
• http://radio.weblogs.com/0101221/2002/05/06.html#a197

(Leslie has been doing stuff too, but his main site is suffering an outage at the moment and I can’t get to the right link – get well soon, 0xDECAFBAD!). While reading, I’ve been playing around a bit too, and have a little script which is fed a ‘tail’ed access_log and looks for referers, grabbing the titles of their pages if possible (using an Orcish maneuver-like mechanism to cache page titles and be a good HTTP citizen).

I run this script in the background:

nohup tail -f access_log | perl lpwc >refer.list 2>refer.log &

and then periodically pull the last ten unique referers and create a nice list that I can then SSInclude in this weblog:

uniq refer.list | tail | perl referers.pl > referers.incl

If nothing else, it reminds me of how powerful *nix command line tools and the humble pipe can be.