• you might want to check how many clicks your externally hosted RSS feed gets,
• you might want to track referrals for advertising revenue or affiliates,
• you might want to create a popularity graphs for sites you link to,
• or you might just be curious!

Here’s a rundown of a few different ways you can count clicks on links outbound from your website, and when you might want to use them:

• Use a Shortlink Service Like Bit.ly
• Use a Plugin for Your CMS
• Use Google Analytics (or Another Tracking Service) to Track Clicks
• Use a Tracking Script on Your Own Server

Some of these methods also allow you to create shorter, branded “pretty” URLs, and allow you to change a URL on many different pages from just one location.

Use a Shortlink Service Like Bit.ly

Link shorteners like bit.ly, is.gd and tinyurl were originally setup to make long URLs shorter to squeeze them into places where there is space limitation like email, the 140 characters of twitter, phone SMS messages, etc. But some shortlink services now provide a lot of analytics data when you use them as a signed in user.

Use this method when:

• you want to setup tracking quickly
• you want track referrer metadata
• you want to create a branded link

How to do it: sign up for a free account on Bit.ly. When you’re signed into your account, create a new shortcode for your link, e.g. http://bit.ly/zAy4rv. Change the outgoing link from http://www.outgoingdomain.com to http://bit.ly/zAy4rv. To view the statistics go to http://bit.ly/zAy4rv+ (the short URL with a + plus on the end) – this will show you the bit.ly “Info Page+” page for this link which includes the total number of clicks, Tweets and Likes, as well as referrer information like countries, web browser, etc.

Use a Plugin for Your CMS

If you use a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress on your website, then you can use a plugin that redirects and tracks links for you. A really powerful plugin like Pretty Link makes outgoing link tracking incredibly simple.

Use this method when:

• you want the tracking data kept on your own servers
• you want to create a branded link
• you want to be able to change links on many different pages from one single location
• you use a CMS that has plugins available

How to do it: install & activate the Pretty Link plugin, click on Add New Link on your dashboard, fill in the URL and hit Create. Copy the resultant link and use that to link to the target website – the plugin will now count how many outgoing clicks it gets.

You can use this to create URLs such as example.com/go/company. You’ll often see these used for outgoing links, particularly for affilate links. These are used for ease of management, tracking, branding, cloaking links to preventing hoplink theft, etc.

The advantage of these kinds of pretty links is you can track all the clicks from that URL, they make the long ugly affiliate URLs into a short pretty branded URL, and we can change the URL on a lot of pages if needed. For example, recently StudioPress changed their affiliate program provider from E-Junkie to Shareasale. If you did not have this option, then you would need to edit each page that the link appears on and change it manually. With this plugin, you simply change the redirect location on one link – example.com/go/studiopress, and it’s changed it on all pages!

Another nice plugin for integration of tracking with Google Analytics is Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics WordPress plugin. He has an article on using Content Drilldown to see outbound clicks on his blog. Which leads us nicely on to…

Use Google Analytics or Another Tracking Service to Track Clicks

You can use Analytics to track clicks on links by manually tagging the outbound link that you want to track. This only works if the visitor clicks directly on the link and does not record visitors who choose “Open in New Tab/Window”.

Use this method when:

• you want to integrate the tracking data with your Google Analytics account

To use it, you need to tag each outbound link with some JavaScript code that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.outgoingdomain.com" onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">

You’ll also need to add some JavaScript to the HTML header, and edit the tracking code – usually in either the header or at the bottom of the page. This Google Analytics help page shows you how to set it up. If you’re not using Google Analytics, search your analytics provider knowledge base for information on tracking outgoing links.

Using a Tracking Script on Your Own Server

A more advanced method for those happy to get their hands dirty with a little programming. What you need to do is add a script to your website which is called whenever you have an outgoing link (we have a free example below). This script should add to a counter every time someone leaves your site via this link, and you should be able to view the count either directly in the database, or create another script to view stats.

Use this method when:

• you want the tracking data kept on your own servers
• you want to integrate the tracking within your own customized scripts

One free example script to do this MyRedirector, a PHP script by Mark Kronsbein. To install the script, copy the code and separate it into the 3 files – the redirect script, the view stats script and the database creation script. Create the database table and edit the other two scripts with the correct access details. For an average programmer, this is less than 5 minutes work.

Once that is set up, just change the outgoing link from http://www.outgoingdomain.com to http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?url=http://www.outgoingdomain.com where redirect.php is the name you used.

Advanced note: by default this particular script gives back a 302 to the browser. This is a good thing, since unlike a 301, a 302 status code means that the redirect should not be cached and the browser should retrieve the same location again.

Suggestions & Questions

Do you have any suggestions for other methods – or improvements to the methods I’ve listed here? Or do you have any questions on particular methods, when to use them, or even the code involved? Post a message with as much information as possible for us in the comments and I’ll address it here.

Post inspired by this question on boards.ie.

All times Irish.

Surface Detail

I recently finished Surface Detail, a Culture novel from Iain M. Banks - entertaining but not up to his usual high standards.

The overall plot concept had great potential, but I think it suffered poor implementation and editing – in particular it has a couple of seemingly important characters who weren’t really explored in any detail and were mostly irrelevant to the story. Banks also did a bit of a Gemmell – wrapping everything up in the last 5 pages. The anti-hero felt bland and a bit stereotypical of the villains in Culture novels (e.g. Matter, The Player of Games).

The positive was the Culture, we got a quick but interesting look at the 3 specialist branches equivalent to Special Circumstances, and the ships were great – especially the Picket Ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints just awesome.

Overall 3/5

The number of signatures on the petition against “SOPA Ireland” (or “Sherlock’s Folly” as some are calling it) is now hitting 60,000 – an incredible number for a petition started just days ago. If you’re an Irish citizen and haven’t yet, please sign it.

There was a brief 15 minute debate in an empty government chamber last night, but thankfully a little common sense seems to be applied to the situation and we’ll have a 50 minute debate on Tuesday next.

Mark Dennehy has a great blog post on his work to get reforms in legislation and why he thinks the system itself needs an overhaul:

I’ve given up on the idea of working legislation in this country at this stage in almost any area of life. We’d need major change to fix the system of government before we’d get decent legislation for anything

We’re going to get some more debate on this issue, but Sherlock appears intent on signing. He seems naive enough to believe that his legislation is fine as it is, and that the courts will deal with any spurious legislation. This beggars belief – we’ve seen the film and music industry in America taking dead people and people who don’t even own computers to court for online copyright violations.

Individuals and small businesses who can’t afford to fight won’t stand a chance – when they get a threatening letter they will not risk the chance of court costs, regardless of how spurious it is.

–

Original post:

Last week, we had SOPA and PIPA in the US. This week in Ireland, in an even less democratic fashion, we have a “statutory instrument”, which requires no parlimentary or public debate, ready to be signed into law by a single minister’s pen.

The “Statutory Instrument Number (TBD) of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011″, otherwise known as the “Irish SOPA” is allegedly being enacted in order to comply with EU law, but the European Commission – which monitors implementation of EU law – doesn’t seem to think Ireland is in breach and hasn’t taken any action against Ireland for failure to introduce blocking.

The situation can no longer be tolerated where Irish Ministers enact EU legislation by statutory instrument. The checks and balances of parliamentary democracy are by-passed.

Very wise! Who said that? Why, the current government in their Programme For Government 2011!

So we have a law being rushed in by the government, with no parlimentary debate – against the wishes of the government’s own programme, in order to comply with EU law that we’re probably not in breach of. It gets worse! The proposed amendment is so vague that no one is completely sure what it will actually mean, even the guy signing it into law. Here’s one interpretation from the chairman of Digital Rights Ireland:

This will give the Irish courts an open-ended power to grant orders against ISPs and other intermediaries who provide facilities which might be used to infringe copyright. This could include hosting providers, social networks, forums, video hosting sites – potentially most online services.

TJ McIntyre (IT Law in Ireland)

And from Ireland’s largest hosting company:

What that translates into in plain English is that we, a hosting provider, could be held liable for a copyright infringement that we knew nothing about. Of course it goes further than that, as it could be (ab)used and force us, and others in industry, to either block access (filter) your internet connection or disable access to entire websites and domains. Or taking it further, if a rights holder found an infringing photo on Facebook they could demand that the site be blocked!

Michele Neylon (Blacknight)

Let’s be clear: I’ve created software and multimedia digital products. I really don’t want people to steal my digital content because it puts food on the table.

But I equally don’t want crazily open ended legislation enacted in my name, or in the name of any content creator from Hollywood to Dublin.

If we need to introduce legislation, let’s take the time to have a full and open debate, and let’s make sure it’s limited in scope so that it covers what it needs to and no more.

There are three ways to fight piracy: endless legal actions, legally blocking access, or creating alternative legit offers.

Frédéric Filloux ( ">MondayNote.com)

Creating alternative offers works. Don’t believe me, listen to one of the richest game developers on Earth:

The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40.

Gabe Newell (owner of game developer Valve Corporation)

Governments around the world are trying to introduce legislation to allegedly protect digital rights holders from online piracy, at the behest of a small number of very large multinational corporations who refuse to accept the changed landscape of digital content production. Most of these legislative efforts are inept at best, and totally corrupt at worst.

The RIAA approach is to sue everyone in sight. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be going so well for them lately.

Because of the MPAA you can’t watch a movie without being forced to watch a long anti-piracy warning (unless, of course, you pirate the movie).

Ridiculously, in Canada and some EU & other countries, you get charged a levy on all blank CDs and SD cards – which are obviously used only to pirate music and never, ever just to back up your Documents folder from last year, right? Monies collected are distributed to rights holders based on commercial radio airplay and commercial sales samples, ignoring radio/college airplay and independent record sales – all of which favours major-label artists. Does that mean I should just buy blank CDs and borrow my Canuck friend’s CD collection for the weekend – I mean it is already paid for, right?

ACTA is an another one of these pieces of legislation, in the form of an international trade agreement. The “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” currently being negotiated by the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries, whose aim is to enforce copyright and tackle counterfeited goods.

Super, I’m all for that! Unless it has really bad side effects, of course.

We are in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds, pushing IP rules, which are very effective at stopping access to life-saving drugs but are very bad at stopping or preventing fake drugs.

Michelle Childs (Médecins Sans Frontières)

Why are all the ACTA negotiations being done secretly? Leaked documents show that one of the major goals of ACTA is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing and net filtering practices. Where have we seen this before? Ah yes, hello MPAA, RIAA, SOPA and (deep breath) our own Statutory Instrument Number (TBD) of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011 (whew).

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions.

Big Content haven’t just declared war on [..] the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors[..] — as well as the scientists, [..] rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

Cory Doctorow (blogger, journalist, and science fiction author)

The Irish SOPA originally had a deadline of next Tuesday, but it looks like the Minister has taken heed of the huge amount of opposition this has generated in such a short time, and will probably abandon the deadline:

Just learned that SOPA legislation NOT going to go ahead without public debate, I believe in the Dáil. Good politics from Gov & Opp.

— Stephen Donnelly TD (@DonnellyStephen) January 25, 2012

Let the government know of your opposition by signing the stopSOPAireland petition here which is currently at around 44,000 signatures (and gaining around 8-10,000 per day over the past 3 days), and tweet your comments with the #SOPAireland hashtag.

As for ACTA, it has the potential to be even worse, and possibly thanks to the secrecy in negotiations, we know very little for sure. Learn more about ACTA here and search for #ACTA on Twitter.

Do your part to learn more about IP rights and piracy. This issue has huge ramifications for the development of the internet and thus our entire society – the future of privacy, communication and commerce for the entire race. It is not a clear cut issue as some interested parties would have you believe. I’ll sign off with this brilliantly simple TED talk on SOPA from Clay Shirky:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl() in /wp-includes/general-template.php on line 2102

First of all, don’t panic, the error seems to affect the admin dashboard but not the publicly accessible areas of your site. Secondly, it’s a fairly simple fix.

The cause is most likely a plugin, and for many people reading this it’s the “PopupDomination” plugin.

Fix for “Fatal Error Undefined Function is_rtl()”:

1. Login to your site via FTP and navigate to the /wp-content/plugins directory.
2. If you have PopupDomination installed look at the directory names starting with ‘P’ and see if you can identify it (it could be “popup-domination”, “popupD” or similar).
3. Rename that folder to “PopupDomination-broken” or something similar.
4. You’re done! Reload the page and everything should be working. Contact the plugin author and ask them for a fixed version and re-enable after you’ve updated.

In the unlikely event that didn’t fix your problem, try the following:

• Deactivate all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).
• Try renaming the plugins directory to plugins-broken by FTP (sometimes, an inactive plugin can cause a problem so this works).
• Deactivate plugins in the mu-plugins folder by renaming that directory to mu-plugins-old

You can find more on how to do this on Fixing a Broken WordPress Site

Hope this helps!

This happened to me - don't let it happen to you :)

• How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell. Entertaining and educational cartoon from Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal. “It’s funny cos it’s true.”
• Do Schools Kill Creativity?  From TED Talks -  Sir Ken Robinson entertains while making a very moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity. Highly recommended – if you watch one online video this week, make it this one.
•  Is Google Making Us Stupid? What effect does using the Internet have on our brains. An article from a couple of years ago, but really interesting and more relevant now than ever.
• Ricky Gervais admits he may be wrong about Twitter. One for the Twitter sceptics: “I may have been wrong about Twitter. [...] Of course there are idiots on Twitter. But there are idiots on the high street and I still go there. People say awful idiotic things all the time, but I don’t give up language because of it.”
• A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A Clay Shirky article about groups, the internet and social software. Quite long but very interesting. A must read if your business is focused on online community (social network, discussion forums, etc).

If you have any suggestions or comments please leave a comment below :)

We’re continuously shooting more videos for you – here’s a list of recently completed screencasts:

• CutAboveHost.com Website Review [FREE VIDEO - no membership required]
• Key Principles Behind Different Hosting Control Panels
• Setting Up StatCounter
• Setting Up Google Analytics
• Setting Up A Standard Gmail Account
• Linking to Particular Part of a Page (HTML Anchors) [will be online 2011-11-05]
• Read More Link in Blog Posts [will be online 2011-11-05]

And recently completed Expert Answers videos:

• The Hosting Business Explained
• Advanced Hosting Options
• How Many Is Too Many Plugins
• Why We Moved to Yoast SEO Plugin

On the way over the next few weeks:

• Show/Hide Content On A Page
• Installing A Picture Gallery
• List of Recommended Plugins
• Ecommerce Plugin Overview
• Backup Plugin Setup
• Yoast SEO Plugin Setup
• Westhost Hosting Setup

We’ve also made some improvements to the website itself since our last update:

• Completed our site move to faster hosting
• Made improvements to code and images to optimise page load times
• Design improvements on the Members Dashboard

Site improvements we will making over the next few weeks :

• Improving the layout of the category pages (e.g. http://www.selfassemblysites.com/cat…dating-content ) – to differentiate between video pages and blog posts
• Tidy up how Tags appear (on all pages)
• Add blog specific sidebar for blog listing page
• Add a new custom field to the videos which will tell you “How this particular video benefits you” (we’re working on figuring out a better way to word that, it’s a bit clunky, but we want to make it really obvious what result you will get from watching any given video)
• Reviewing the plugins we use on the site currently, ensuring we have everything we want installed

We will update this community forum thread regularly – feel free to add your suggestions and comments!

Thanks,
Alastair.

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If you’d like to attend a live classes somewhere in Dublin on learning WordPress, please leave a comment below with a real email address so we can contact you if it goes ahead.

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