What's a good CTR?

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by ecchi

Hmm, (1) is a lot of work, and a hell of a lot of link lists don't allow CGI, which kills (2) and (3). Plus redirects are a big no-no for most of them.

Every paid hosting account on a Linux/Apache server I've ever worked with has access logs enabled, so that requires no work on my part. At most I've had to request that those access logs be copied to an accessible dir every 24 hours, which has never been a problem.

My freesites don't use cgi, they're static html files. Outgoing links to the sponsor point to a file with a single line of code:

<?php header("Location: URL"); ?>

A hit to this file creates an entry in my access log, a record of the outgoing click.

I've been using PHP header redirects for my outgoing links for a couple years I think, and no link list worth submitting to has declined me so far... I can't remember any declining for it, to be honest.

Parsing the access logs is the only difficult part, and even that is quite easy with Python. I wouldn't attempt it with PHP though.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the log parser is a stand alone script, in no way connected to the freesites except where I define what is a freesite.