I never see the most downloaded image on my website. Well - hardly ever. Here it is:
Brash? Yes! Bright? Yes! It's an advertising link, to let people who arrive at our web site looking for technical information (and there are thousands a day) know that we can help them with training courses. But of course people don't want to be overrun with adverts so once the point has been made, more subtle links are provided on following pages.
The $_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER] variable in PHP tells all of our pages the URL of the page on which a link was clicked to bring them to our site, and for search engines, that includes the query string that they entered. A little simple analysis with regular expressions, and Robert's your father's brother (or should that be "Bob's your Uncle").
We have a series of about 10 images like these ...
... in that case displayed to people who are searching for Melksham or
hotel. If you want to see them in full technicolor (I HAVE warned you!) have a look
here.
We have a script which shows you the most downloaded images from our site that I wrote a few weeks ago and if you want to see the source so that you can do something like this, it's here.
(written 2008-02-19, updated 2009-08-31)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G997 - Well House Consultants - Newsletter Lead Articles [1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)
[1065] Graham Ellis - an Introduction - (2007-02-05)
[1136] Buffering output - why it is done and issues raised in Tcl, Perl, Python and PHP - (2007-04-06)
[1224] Object Relation Mapping (ORM) - (2007-06-09)
[1318] Well House Manor - feature comparison against the old place! - (2007-08-24)
[1386] New software product for warmblooded programmers - (2007-10-10)
[1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
[1600] Cambidge - Tcl, Expect and Perl courses - (2008-04-04)
[1663] Python in an afternoon - a lecture for experienced programmers - (2008-06-01)
[1754] Upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5 - the TRY issue - (2008-08-15)
[1819] Calling base class constructors - (2008-10-03)
[1912] Book now for 2009 - (2008-11-29)
[2052] How was my web site compromised? - (2009-02-24)
[2119] Make your business a DESTINATION business - (2009-04-05)
[2253] Walks in and around Melksham, Wiltshire - (2009-06-21)
[2370] C++, Python, and other training - do we use an IDE - (2009-08-21)
[2425] Weekend and Christmas Promotion - Well House Manor Hotel, Melksham - (2009-09-26)
[2538] Open Source Training Centre and Courses for 2010 - (2009-12-16)
[2743] Public Open Source Training Courses running this summer and autumn in Melksham - (2010-04-27)
[3202] Telling you something about us in just one line - (2011-03-15)
A211 - Web Application Design and Deployment [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
[356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
[443] Server side scripting of styles to suit the browser - (2005-09-12)
[659] Web Application Components - (2006-03-28)
[767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
[1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
[1256] What country are you in? How we find out on our web site - (2007-07-03)
[1351] Compressing web pages sent out from server. Is it worth it? - (2007-09-14)
[1547] New bathing idea for hotels from Hotelympia - (2008-02-20)
[1798] What does an browser understand? What does an HTML document contain? - (2008-09-15)
[2072] Copyright, Portability and other nontechnical web site issues - (2009-03-09)
[3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
Some other Articles
http, https and ajp - comparison and choiceHotelympia - show report - the lighter sideThe geometry of East LondonLetting new visitors know we provide training coursesFSB, EGM, AGM.Learning Object Oriented Principles (and perhaps Java)Are nasty programs looking for security holes on your server?Colour, Composition or ContentChinese New Year