Top viewed pages

I want to show a list of the top viewed pages on my site. How do I go about doing this?

I use PHP and MySQL on the site already. So how do I add code in order to keep track of the number hits each page gets?

Do I need to do something with cookies, tracking the ip, etc....

Thanks

 

At the top of each page you need to add a hit to the database. The best way to do this is to set up a database as follows:

id, page, number_of_hits
1,index.php,12

At the top of the page you select the number of hits for that particular page and then increment this number by 1. Then you write the new number back to the database.

So when a hit is registered in index.php3 the number 12 is selected and increased to 13 before the database is updated to show 13 hits.

You should also use sessions to make sure duplicate hits and page refreshes are not counted. You would create a session for each page when the hit was counted and do a check when the page was loaded to see if the session was registered.

I can provide a script if you need it.

 

Thanks for the reply.

The session part is important. I don't want somebody to simply hit refresh to jack up the hit count!

If you have a basic script I can look at that would be great.

You can PM me if you like.

Thanks again.

 

Try this:

$page=$PHP_SELF;
$result = MYSQL_QUERY("SELECT hits FROM hitsdb WHERE page='$page'");
if (!$row=mysql_fetch_array($result))
exit();
				
if(!session_is_registered("$page")){
$newhits=1+$row[hits];
session_register($page);
$result = MYSQL_QUERY("UPDATE hitsdb SET hits='$newhits' WHERE page='$page'");
}

PHP:

 

Thanks I'll try it out later!

 

You may wind up with "threading issues" if this this is a busy site and two people try to load the same page at the same time. Say person A opens the page when the hit count is 12. Person B opens it at the same time and also gets a count of 12. Then both update the database. Now the hit count is 13 instead of 14.

To get around this, you can do something like:

if(!session_is_registered("$page")) {
session_register($page);
$result = MySqlQuery("update hitsdb set hits=hits+1");
}

Totally untested, but that's the basic idea.

Good luck. This is an interesting idea.