How do you know if someone bookmarks your site?

Hi!

Not sure if this is the right place to put this topic, but I was wondering if I could find out how many people bookmark my sites?

I know that a webstats program which reads from the server log file reports how many people bookmarked, but I don't know how it does this, and whether I could do the same and actually identify which individual pages ware bookmarked.

Thanks for any help!

As far as I know you cannot do this from a webpage.

you might be able to log keystrokes and find how many people hit ctrl+b but thats a looooooooooooooooooooooooo..........oooooooo........oooooooooong shot.

Hmmm. So how does the stats program I use report the % of people who bookmark? All I feed it is my weblog.

Maybe it just "guesses" depending on the number of direct hits to a webpage?

I can honestly say I have never seen a stats program that logs how many people saved your site as a favorites. I can also honestly say that I would be interested in knowing this if it is possible.

I use AWSTATS which reports a %, and also I know that http://www.hitboxcentral.com reports whether or not people used bookmarks to visit your site.

So either they are both guessing on the use of bookmarks by looking at whether or not people typed in a direct url to get to your page, or there is a specific data format written into the log file.

Maybe... an applet that take counts of <CTRL-B> and print them out to the label....

^_^

I am a newbie here, just wanna give an opinion too...heheh..
What about from clicks?
For example, you put a link where if people click on the link, they bookmark your site, so you can count the clicks.

well that would work, but I think he is trying to figure out how is logging program does that.

Dr. Nick - Do you have a section of the log we could have a look see at or anything?

I'm pretty sure its not in the log file itself (i.e., there isn't a special code for when someone does an "add to your favorites" command).

You can see what I mean with the bookmark reporting: scroll to the end of this stats page for the program that I use:

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

At least, on that page they write "estimated" for their 'add to favorites' field, so I guess that must be it, somehow they estimate a value when they think someone comes direct from a bookmark.

I think I'll just add a javascript 'add to your bookmarks' link on my page, and just count that

I'm not 100% on this, but i think it has something to do with the HTTP_REFERER environment variable. That will be able to tell you if your page was accessed with a bookmark. To determine unique vistors that have a bookmark set, could you set up a cookie? Only unique bookmarked hits would increment the counter you set.

But i'm just making stabs. Try this link for starters:

http://perl.about.com/library/weekly/aa090303a.htm

Johnny

try this script described at :
http://www.perpetualpc.net/srtd_bkmrk.html
it works quite well for me. You can adjust what it leaves in or takes out by changing the values in the first grep that takes out search engines. It essentially takes out all ( well most ) entries that don't come from search engines and returns only unique ip addresses so you don't have to search through thousands of entries. If you use this each month you can tell if your site is gaining popularity or loosing. For example, mine gets about 10 new users each day. Just compare the number of unique hits you get in each monthly file. If you leave the script intact you will have a consistent reference point to compare each result. At the end of the year you can run the script on the whole 12 months. This works on Linux and possibly unix, I haven't tested it yet on BSD. If you are using windows, I don't know what to tell you except maybe try Linux or Unix you might like it.

Yeah, basically it determines a rough guess as to how many people have added you to their bookmarks based upon the number of people visiting, how many visits each of those people make to your site, the referrer that they initially came from...

Remember those entering your URL manually, or those clicking non-referrable links (such as those in E-Mails in Outlook & other E-Mail clients), are going to show up as "direct/bookmark" links and will throw this guesstimate off.

I think the last post was directed at me. Thank you for the info; it is much appreciated. I'll be working on the script to try to improve it with your comments in mind.

Was just generally directed at anybody interested in scripts that estimate how many bookmarks you've had