Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : Reddit Recently Viewed Links

[GregVernon]

I've been curious about this for awhile, but how does the Recently Viewed Links section work?

I figure it must be a jquery action that tracks when a link is clicked. Does anyone know more of the programming behind this? i.e. making sure the new page isn't loaded before the tracking has occurred?

Thanks!

[che09]

I've heard a lot of feed back about this. Though,more on the negative side. I think Reddit,has a sensible reason on putting this Recently Viewed Links,thus they might have implemented it too soon.

As far as I've read they are doing something to put an option on turning it off!

[jstanden]

You can inspect their Javascript and cookies with the Chrome Developer Tools or Firebug for Firefox.

It looks like they're adding an "onclick" event to links, which stores the recent history in the "<username>_recentclicks2" cookie as '%' delimited story IDs.

If you add an "onclick" event to a link it will fire before the browser changes the page, in the same way an "onsubmit" will fire before a FORM submits.

<a href="http://google.com" onclick="alert('You clicked me.  Now redirecting you!');">Click me</a>

The same is true of click events that you bind using jQuery.

[Harzem]

<a href="http://google.com" onclick="this.href = 'http://track.me/tracker.php?redirect-to=' + this.href">Click me</a>

This will override the current link, send it to the tracker, so the tracker can redirect the user.