If we're going to fully appreciate the Community Server URL Redirect function, we must first agree that it is inappropriately named. It should be called a URL Tracker, or something along those lines, because that's what it does and is what we care about. Using URL redirection, this nifty CS function tracks the hits of the pages on our sites that we want to monitor.
I think we'll come together on the sweetness of URL Redirection by walking through an example on my site. Everybody, hold hands.
For my CS 2.0 theme I wanted to display a group photo that always makes me smile when I look at it. It's a photo of a Swedish musical group led by percussionist
Bengt Berger. I know nothing about Mr. Berger or his band. All I know is that the photo makes me smile and I wanted to share it.
What better way to demonstrate URL Redirection than to track how many people discovered this wonderful photo through my site? There are three items I want to track to get an accurate read on how many smiles the photo of these charming musicians generated. I first want to track how many people go to the post I wrote about the photo by clicking on the small sidebar group image.
Then on the post itself, I want to track two things. I want to track how many times people click on the photo to display the full-size JPEG (green arrow) and I want to track how many times people click through to Bengt Berger's website (circled in red.)
Now we can go to the Control Panel and talk about the redirection aspect of URL Tracking. We track those elements (the sidebar link to the post, the display of the full-size .JPG file and link to Bengst's website) by creating a URL in the form of /r.ashx?#, where "#" represents the number of the redirection item ID.
To track how many times people click on the sidebar image to view the post about the photo, the URL I will want to track is /blog/archive/2005/12/20/3725.aspx. To track that URL, I create a /r.ashx?# URL which performs all of the magic for me. I enter the URL, provide a description, and click "Create." That creates the /r.ashx?# URL, which I obtain from the "View" button modal window (below,) which I will copy and paste on my sidebar control in place of the original URL.
Got it? Same thing with the blog post. I replace the URL to the .JPG and Bengt Berger's site with their respective r.ashx?# URLs and I've got Insta-Tracking, Baby!
P.S. A big thanks to Jose Lema whose
recent post about URL Redirection prompted me to investigate and implement Bengt Berger smile tracking at dbvt.com.
[tags: Community Server]