Concept & Algorithm: How to record only single URL for widget?

Question

I have created a widget for my web application. User's getting code and just pasting that code in their website and my widget works on their website something like twitter, digg and other social widgets.

My widget is on the basis of post, for a single post (say postid: 234) I am providing single widget, so anyone can embed the widget on their website.

Now I want to know that where all my widget is posted and for which post? for that I have recorded the URL of the site when my widget start (onload) but the problem arises when someone placed the widget in their blog or website's common sidebar. I am recording URL each time and hence if it's in sidebar of a blog then it's recording URL for every post which is creating duplicates.

can anyone help on this? How should I go so that I have only one single record for a widget on a site?

Answer 1

I think doing something like this is a bit tricky. Here are some ideas that pop to mind

You could for example ask the user to input their site's URL when they get the widget, or the widget could track the domain or subdomain, thus giving less URLs.

Just tracking the domain would obviously be problematic if the actual site is domain.com/sitename/, and there could be more than one site under the domain. In that case, you could attempt to detect the highest common directory. Something like this:

You have multiple URLs like this: domain.com/site/page1, domain.com/site/page2, and so on. Here the highest common directory would be domain.com/site.

I don't think that will always work correctly or provide completely accurate results. For accuracy, I think the best is to just ask the user for the URL when they download the code for the widget.

Edit: new idea - Just generate a unique ID for each user. This could be accomplished by simply taking the current timestamp or something, and hiding it into the code snippet the user is supposed to copy. This way you can track the ID itself and any URLs and domains it appears in can be grouped under it.

If you have an ID which doesn't get a hit in say week or something you could remove it from your database, and that way avoid filling it up with unused IDs.

Answer 2

I agree with Jani regarding a unique id. When you dish out the script you'll then be able to always relate back to that id. You are still going to have duplicates if the user uses the same id over and over, but at least you'll have a way of differentiating one user from another. Another useful advantage is that you are now able to, as Jani said, group by the ID and get a cumulative number for all of the instances where that user used the script & id.