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A HREF links

WebHub builds A HREF links on the fly, automatically.

Surfer Tracking uses the URL
By now you've probably read that WebHub tracks the surfer through a unique number in the URL. And if you have been watching your own URLs go by as you read pages on this site, you may have noticed that a number keeps following you around. It's your current session number.

Your session number is 1515342774.

Look at any page link and you will see that Session Number. Just move your mouse over a page link now to see for yourself.

From an HTML specialist's point of view, this raises a big question - how do you write the A HREF links, given that they have to be customized for each surfer? In WebHub, you make page links with macros. The WebHub macros reference the target pages by their PageIDs, instead of by filenames.

Linking example
When you design your site, you give each page an indentifying name, called the PageID. When you want to link to a page, you do it by PageID, instead of the l-o-n-g  w-a-y required by standard HTML and CGI. Here is an example of the syntax one would use when linking to a PAGEID called CONTACT:

(~JUMP|CONTACT|Link to the Contact Page~)

When this macro is expanded, it creates this:

Link to the Contact Page

As long as you use the WebHub macros to link your pages, surfers will keep their session numbers, and state will be preserved.

Additional benefits to using page aliasing
Page aliasing uses a PageID and some optional parameters to essentially set up a short alias that refers to a much longer URL (e.g. Contact aliases to: /contact).

You can set up an alias that goes beyond your current web application by using the optional parameters for "AppID" and "ServerID":

  • JUMP to pages in other WebHub applications on the same machine with no loss of session data.
  • JUMP to pages running on other web server ports on the same machine with no loss of session data; for example, to port 443 for secure HTTPS.
  • JUMP to pages in other WebHub applications on different machines. As long as the two machines share a file server drive, there is no loss of session data.
Running: WebHub-v3.287 compiled with d29_win64 on Microsoft-IIS/10.0,
Thu, 31 Oct 2024 23:27:54 UTC
Session 1515342774, 1 pages sent to Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com) at 18.222.168.192;
Time to produce this page: 0msec.