What method would be best for doing this?

[richiec]

Hi there... on my site it lists links to other sites. I want the user to be able to click a button to mark any site they have visited. From then on a small icon will load up next to that link whenever they visit that page again.

I was thinking maybe I should use cookies to store which sites have been visited/marked (using site ID's which I could then check up against a MySQL database). But the user might end up marking hundreds of sites, would the cookie get too big in that case? Should I be looking at another way of doing this?

any help is appreciated
thanks -rich

[westmich]

Cookies are generally the only option, wheather it be per-session or persistent, for adding 'memory' to a Web-page.

Do you plan to use JavaScript or some server-side language?

You might also achieve a simpler effect using CSS and the visited link property.

[richiec]

I was hoping to use PHP to check the link ID's against the MySQL database. I really wanted it to remember the everything permanently, and I don't think this is possible with CSS?

Is there some sort of maximum size limit on a cookie or can they be as big as you want?

[johnnydaboy]

The maximum size of a cookie is 4000 bytes and there is a limit of 20 cookies per domain.