It’s all very well getting the recent 100 referrals on SIteMeter but unless you stump up the cash, that’s as much as sitemeter will let you see, and IT’S NOT ENOUGH. I crave referral stats, I want to keep the data FOREVER. So as the FT server can’t be set up to do it either, I contrived a way to let my mac do the equivalent of continually refreshing the above link.
I have a perl script cron’d to run every 3 or 4 minutes that includes this code:
$_ = `curl -s "http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?blahblah"`; while (/default.asp?action=stats&site=ftrig&visit=([^&]*)&report=9/g) { $session_id=$1; /size="2">(.*?)
which parses the HTML of the referral page to find all 20 of the listed referral URLs and session_ids (an integer from 1 to 100). When a session_id pops up that wasn’t in the list last time, it is USUALLY a new session, so log the referral. (Perl fans: you could do a list-context “/sg” match to get all the results at once, but you’d still need to loop through the list anyway.)
There, I hope you enjoyed that – I’m still not entirely sure it’s appropriate. And if this gets our sitemeter accounts shutdown I am sincerely sorry.