The problems with this is that it is slow (one more page load) and that the link the user sees does not lead to the page, ie the link text “WebHostNinja” and then the user expects the link to be something like “http://www.webhostninja.com” and nothing else. I don’t like this from a usability point of view. Not that I have any evidence for it, but I suspect that relevant outgoing links help the sites Google juice. Definitly it helps the Page Rank of the site I link to, and why should I not help them?

My solution is to use some jQuery magic. Download and install jQuery (btw, if you like jQuery, then take a look at the fantastic jQuery tools). Then add the class “track_this_link” to each link tag that you want to track as well as give each link tag an unique id (so you can track which link is which). The href attribute should point to the external site directly and not to some internal page. The link above would now look like this:

<a href='http://www.webhostninja.com' id='123' class='track_this_link'>WebHostNinja</a>

Next step is to add a some javascript that adds an onClick event to all the links with the class “external_link”:

$(document).ready(function(){
$('a.track_this_link').click(function() {
$.post(http://www.digitalistic.com/tracker.php, {id:this.id});
return true;
});
});

This means that each time an external link is clicked a post request is sent to digitalistic.com/tracker.php with a unique id for the link in question. What is left is to implement the tracker.php script so that it can handle the post and save the data you are interested in to the database in a secure and correct way. I am happy to just summarize the number of clicks per link on a daily basis, but if you want to save detailed data for each click.

Do you have a better solution to this problem? Let me know!

Even of Coda is great, it is not so great that it can not be made greater (so much for simplicity, hehe), which is pretty simple since Coda allows for plugins. In the Coda Developer Zone there are a number of plugins listed, and if you look around on the web you can find even more. Also, you can easily add new code completion, reference books and other goodies. This is a list of the stuff the extra stuff I have used and am very happy with so far…

URL Encode
This is a a very simple but very practical plugin that allows you to highlight some text in your HTML files and then URL Encode it. As a Swede using a lot of words with åäö it is very usefull.

PHP Toolkit
This plugin makes it easy to validate and clean up PHP files.

CodeIgniter Syntax Mode
Code completion with CodeIgniter classes and functions, a must if you are using Coda to develop CodeIgniter applications. You can download the file here and read more about it in this thread in the CodeIgniter forums. I have made this syntax mode my default one for PHP files since I hardly do any PHP that is not CodeIgniter anymore.

Extra books
It is easy to include help files about programming languages etc in Coda in the form of “books”. Out of the box Coda comes with books about PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript, but it is easy to add more. Here is a great list of more books you can include in Coda, complete with icons and all. Personally I have added CodeIgniter and jQuery so far, but I am sure some Django, Drupal and WordPress will sneak in as time goes by.

What are your favourite add ons to Coda? Please let me know if I have missed something I just must have!