It figures. I don’t know whether it was Murphy or the previously mentioned “narrative convention” but the very instant that I installed Dean Allen’s excellent Refer scripts to keep track of referrals to the various pages of my website, I was referral porn spammed by a passing bot. I have now made some changes to the scripts to reduce referral spam. Hopefully that helps.
Oh well. For those of you who might be interested there are some links to what is probably some hot stuff in my new referral page. At some point later today, I’ll update my various MT templates to include a link to this.
There are a couple of very cool things about these scripts. The first is that they are not a plug-in to Movable Type. This means that they’ll keep track of all pages on your website—even ones not served by MT.
The second cool thing is that by making a simple change to your .htaccess file (which the installer explains) you don’t have to insert any new lines into your webpages. Apache and PHP will take care of everything for you. Nearly instant on.
The third cool thing is that it only uses one table in a MySQL database so you can easily configure it to add the table into your existing MT database. (My ISP only allows me a limited number of MySQL databases. I wasn’t sure I wanted to use up one of those just for referrers.) Just make sure you don’t use one of the existing MT table names.
As you can probably infer from the text above, Refer requires PHP and MySQL to run. If your ISP doesn’t allow those things, you’re out of luck. Sorry.