On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 6:18 PM, Mark Rogers said:
There's doubtless some standard packages available for this but your desire to create one yourself is laudable.
My simple prog is rather basic (you can sneak a peak at: http://www.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/counters/counter_admin.... ) but is good enough for the moment while I learn more skills to refine it.
Something to consider (if you haven't already) would be to use a session cookie within the script so that refreshes from a single visit do not increase the count (unless you want a high count :-)
I like the idea of counting raw page views as it gives me an idea of which pages are most popular.
I am not sure about your session idea. I do not understand the concept fully but it sounds like this will just record the first page a visitor loads. I suppose this could be a handy stat to have in addition to raw views as I suppose this session count would give an indication about the first page a visitor loads on our website. Our website is very simple and basic at the moment but this coming year we hope to greatly increase the number of pages and amount of content so I suppose there is a chance our website may then become listed on Google et al. When this occurs I suppose your session idea would let us discover which pages people arrive at via search engines as well as how man unique visitors we get.
Sounds like I have a lot of homework to do!
Thanks once again for your help.
Sagr.