(2002-10-11) Backlinks Quote Pull

Mark Pilgrim takes BackLinks yet another step ahead, by pulling sentence quotes surrounding the links leading to his blog entries. And of course he provides his Python code. This semi-overcomes one of the biggest problems with Browser Referer data, which is that most of the traffic comes from other blogs' home page URL rather than the specific quoting entry, so as time passes it's hard to back-track those links to find the specific reference. Now you'll still have problems finding it, but it won't matter as much because you'll have gotten the key quote. On the other hand, he strips out any HREFs in the referring entry, so you lose that... (and in my case that leaves un-linked question-marks trailing unused WikiWords).