Has my article been read?

So you've written a website with pages of search-engine-friendly text and you know how many unique visitors you are getting from your weblogs. But how much of your perfectly crafted prose is actually being read?

You could argue that with the weblogs of a site containing many small pages linked together you would have that information. But whenever I navigate to an article that has half a dozen pages, I know it certainly frustrates me.

So if you are writing long pages (ie, with more text that can fit on the screen in one viewing) you are going to need a way of working out whether people have actually bothered to read all that you are writing.

And once again, Ajax comes to the rescue.

Using javascript it's possible to figure out the position of the scroll bar. And using Ajax it's easy to tell the server about this position.

You could even write some server-side code to distinguish between a quick browse down the page and a full-on page read.