CS Spotlight: Url Redirects
Today I figured I'd blog about an unknown, but great feature of Community Server. While I'm not committing to start another "daily" of tips/tricks/news, like Jaxon, Keyvan, Jayson, or even our newly hired Evangelist, Dave Burke, I do hope to spotlight some unknown CS features somewhat regularly. We'll see how it works out.
So, for today, I figured I'd shine the light on our Url Redirects feature. If you've ever seen http://www.tinyurl.com, you'll be familiar with url redirects. Let's say you're interested in advertising, but also tracking the success of those ads. Or you'd just like to track how your users arrived at your site. While you could do analysis by viewing server logs or using other products, you could also use our url redirect feature.
Let's walk thru an example. I've decided that I want to track how many folks get to my blog from my www.communityserver.org profile. So instead of entering my blog address directly, I'll create a url redirect.
- Go to Control Panel > Administration > System Tools > Manage Url Redirects
- Enter the location you want folks to be redirected to. In this case, it'll be my blog url.
- Enter an optional description to help you remember where you're using this. In this case, it'll be "my profile on cs.org"
- Click Create.
Now you'll see a new entry in the grid. To see what the "tiny url" is, just click on View. A modal will popup that allows you to copy/paste the url and use it anywhere.
As users click on your url redirect link, they'll be redirected to the appropriate url, and the hits will be recorded. Come back at any time to view how many times it's been used.
If you look closely, you'll notice that we use this feature as part of CS itself. In fact, since the url is absolute, you could use this feature to redirect to any website, not just your own CS installation.
Until next time...