Well, there's a Backlink ... (16 Jun 2002)
Well, there's a Backlink of the Day bar now. It's not really `of the day' as such - I grep them out of the logs by hand but it will do for the moment. Coincidentally, Keith is talking about implimenting backlinks as well today.
The two Google links above show one of the problems at the moment. In one case Google is linking to the text of Fear and Loathing which is fine because that's on a static page. However, the other is linking to a blog entry on the front page which long ago fell off the bottom.
In the Google case you can view the cached version of the IV frontpage, but in the general case the Referer header generated from people clicking links of the frontpage will be http://imperialviolet.org, not http://imperialviolet.org/page4.html#e72. We need some way to tell the browser what the source of a link should be.
Unfortunately, we cannot just add tags or attributes to existing tags without all the validators going nuts. That either leaves trying to get a change through the W3C (ye gods!), overloading some existing operator or hiding it in comments. None of those solutions are much good - anyone have any better ones?