Display last X visited pages

[Anon]

I am trying to figure out the best way to do a little something...

I want to have a little section on each page that will display the last x pages the user has visited on my site, as links...

Sessions may be less code than cookies, but both have their drawbacks...the problem I'm seeing is making a kind of an array to do it all with a limit that can be changed (one day I may want to display the last 5 pages they visited, or the last 20...should be able to do that as easily as possible). Also, how would I go about setting the current page as one of the visited pages (but not displaying it in the list of visited pages), and when setting the current page, knocking off the oldest page if it is higher than the x amount I want to show?

Any ideas would be apreciated.

[Anon]

Use a database; store in it the page name, visitor's session_id, and a time stamp of when the page was visited.

Each page you want tracked inserts a row with the above data. Nothing in particular needs to be stored in the session - we just want the ID - but it can't hurt to use it for something else at the same time.

Now it's just a "SELECT pagename FROM visits WHERE sessionid='$current_sesstion_id' ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 20" query.

You might want every now and then (e.g. a random 1 out of 100 hits on your home page) to DELETE any rows more than (say) a month old, or (which is a bit slower) any records with session_id's that don't appear in PHP's /tmp directory.