I am having a mobile site developed, however, my developer has been unable to find a suitable code to pull a MOBILE PHONE visitor's REFERRAL URL and prefill a form with that information. Limitations: HTTP_REFERRER is only valid if the user clicks on a link to get to my site. I need a way to pull the user's referral url if they are visiting any site and decide to visit mine by pulling up their bookmark menu and selecting my link. Javascript support for mobile phones is unreliable. ---- Any help would be appreciated! Thanks, Jorge
I think you're guaranteed to be out of luck on this one, for two reasons: a) HTTP_REFERER is not guaranteed to be 'valid', full stop. It's generated by the browser and is generally set to the site that the user came from. However, users can and do either stop sending the referer string, and / or make their own. b) finding out what page the visitor was at last time, with or without JavaScript is a major security issue and I doubt any half decent browsers would let you get that information. You can be guaranteed it doesn't get sent by the browser, at least. Sorry, but that's life
Thanks for your honest reply. The site this will be for is a mobile social bookmarking site. I wanted to find a way for people to add bookmarks from their phone without having to type in a long url from memory (which will probably never happen) and didn't want them to have to use a pc to add the bookmark. I'm already going to implement a code people can add to their blogs/sites to have people click to add the url, but I wanted something to set me apart from the other mobile sb site that requires a whole application download to achieve this.
Yeah, unless you can get them to install an extension of some sort, I can't see how this would be possible. I don't know what browsers are used on 'phones, but if it were something like Firefox or Opera you should be able to make an extension to do this. Sorry.
I just found out that Opera Mini supports a few javascript functions, including location, and found an article explaining how to setup a bookmarklet. That is promising!