What is the purpose of "Link Me"?
I am new to Weblogs so please forgive me if this seems a foolish question. When I click on the "Link Me" link I am taken to a new page with the story I "linked", but nothing else happens. Is something else meant to happen? What is the purpose of "Link Me"? I have also read via antville help talk of "referral" links. I don't understand what this means either. Please Explain. I just want to know the use of these types of links as someday they may prove useful to me.
mutant
it's the permanent link. if you want to link directly to a story, this is helpful.
praschl
If someone on the net wants to link to one of your weblog entries, he will choose the "link me"-link. As all your entries won´t appear on the frontpage of your weblog after some days (but instead be archived), you need permanent links, which always will point to a unique entry.
e.g.: the permanent link to this entry is http://help.antville.org/stories/153490/ - and not http://help.antville.org
referral links: if someone links to one of your stories, the link doing so is called a "referral link" because it refers to your story.
hope that helps.
JohnWalsh
Thanks for the explanation.
So the "Link me" link is for the benefit of my readers. I assume they just add the "link" to their favourites for future reference.
It sounds like referral links are merely statistics of people "linking" to your surprised. I am impressed Antville has the ability to record these links. Where do I find a record of referral links? I doubt I will have any yet but its nice to know.
Thanks in advance
misaki
http://(yout site's name).antville.org/referrers/
for example, for this help page it is http://help.antville.org/referrers/
nex
not quite, misaki. the /referrers page only shows referrers from the last 24 hours. placing the <% story.backlinks %> macro at the bottom of your "full story" skin might also help.
by the way, i think the expression "link me" really isn't quite self-explanatory. afaik, bloggers use the term "permalink", which might be a better choice in some situations and a worse in others.
maybe it would be easier to just make clear that you can also see the story on its very own page (not that i had a great idea what to call that link, but what about having the story title referencing this.link?) and rely on the intelligence of the readers who should figure out by themselves that linking a story is different from linking the frontpage.
this reminds me of another issue: when you browse through "older stories" in an archive like the storypool (or the notes on fm4.orf.at, which are not antville, but also some helma app, right?), the index is of the form "start=20" and based on the _newest_ entry. if it was the other way round and based on the _oldest_ entry, links to particular pages would automagically become permanent. the meaning of a link would no longer be "show me n entries, starting at the 20th-newest", but instead, "show me n entries, starting with number 7342". this would be so much more useful. implementing this wouldn't even require giving up the current functionality, if you name the new property somethign other than "start".
JohnWalsh
Nex,
For some reason I cannot reply to your comment - is this a bug or did you do something to prevent a reply?
I agree with your suggestion that the the permanent link should be linked from the title.
I am completely lost about your point about older stories, but hopefully one day I will understand as I am only a beginner.
I appreciate your response explaining the referrals link too.
Thanks
John
nex
you can't reply to my comment because it already is a reply to a comment. you could have used the reply link below its parent.
my point abput older stories was rather directed at the developers who are maintaining the notes, because i actually missed this functionality there, not in antville so far. the simple explanation is: imagine i see a page with a nifty comment at the office and want to link it, so i can send the link home, view it again from there and write a nifty reply. as the link isn't permanent, i can't do this. if the pages were numbered the other way round, the link would be permanent (since entry #1234, which is the newest but one, will still be #1234 when it's the newest but 50) and i could do this.