Question

I would like to create a link where the href performs a GET from my server first to record a view metric before redirecting to the external page.

How do you create a click through A link where hovering over the link shows the external destination url, however, clicking on the first goes to my metric page which redirects to the real external page?

I thought of something like this. The title is only on hover and not on the status bar.

<a href="/metric/id" title="http://www.example.org">http://www.example.org/</a>

Sites like google search results do this.

I tried searching for this. Like this question, I am not even sure what this is called.

thanks

(please feel free to retag)

Answer 1

I’m not familiar with a way to do this, but you could attach an onClick event to your link and have that call a function that fires off an AJAX request to your metric URL so that you can record it before the link is followed.

Your link would become

<a href="[REAL URL]" title="http://www.example.org" onclick="record(id)">http://www.example.org/</a>

And then in JavaScript (using jQuery here to make this faster/its awesome)

function record(id) {
    jQuery.get('http://..../metric/' + id')
}