I have quite a few sites which promote the same merchant, some of them are quite old and have static HTML pages. I got an email from a merchant saying they are changing their linking code as of right now (thanks for the notice) and as such all my links on hundreds of pages are now invalid and require me to do a lot of tedious modifying of pages, or  a mass search and replace (which rarely works 100%)

A redirect script basiclly allows you to send traffic to yoursite.com/redirect.php?id=1 instead of direct to the merchant, a database will contain all your links with a link ID, when a user visits your redirect script, the database will lookup the URL and redirect you to the merchant based on the URL in the database. This means if a merchant changes the linking code at any time, all you have to do is modify the URL in your database, saving you loads of hassle.

As such I have decided to work on my own script (after not coding for quite a while :-s ) it will allow me to add new URLS and even view stats on how many people clicked on each link per day, where they came from etc. Eventually I hope to release it as a free product once it becomes good enough.

Stay tuned

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.