hyperlink click counter

[Lukenet]

Hi all,

I know this may seem basic, but I am just looking for different ways to tackling this problem.

Here are the specs.

I want to count how many times someone clicks on a link to an external site.

I want to store that information (the number of clicks) in a DB (MySQL) so I can retrieve it later and use it for things like top 5 clicked links etc..

I want to make the method of collecting the information as transparent to the end user as possible.

Extra info
I want to store the link info i.e. the URL and link text in the DB as well.

I will also have the links under various sections.

Well what do you think? I am looking for a number of different ways to do this. I will probably use / learn / develop a solution from the simplest, most elegant suggestion that is also the most transparent to the end user.

The project is just for me, I want to make a link page for my favourite sites (URLs) and learn some PHP in the process.

Lukenet

[coditoergosum]

Sounds like a good beginner project. It should be pretty simple to create... and there's probably a few different ways you could do it.

The way I would do it (which might not be the best) would be to create a "gateway" script to handle all of the links. Basically you'd call the script by passing the url as a GET string, like this:

<a href="gateway.php?url=www.blahblah.com">

Then, the gateway script will take the url var and dump it into a db. You could do a number of things here to, depends on what you want to accomplish with it though. You could just insert a new row into a table for each time a url was clicked... or, you could check to see if the url already exists in the db, and if so increment a counter for it... or, there's a number of different things you could do here. You could even keep track of IP addresses, and HTTP referers, etc.

As far as being "transparent" to the user, they will see the url as gateway.php?url=www.someurl.com, but I'm not sure if that's a concern for you. Also, I can't think of any other way to do it... but there's always more than one way to skin a cat.

[Pig]

I would do something similar. The only thing I think was left off was passing the user the right page. having a gateway page doesn't do you any good unless you direct the to the page they want.

run the query, and then send a header to redirect the page. It will appear transparent, unless they actually view the href of the link.

Alternatively, you could send them to a page that has the query, and instead of sending a header, make the page a frameset ala hotmail. The top frame says "you are visiting a site outside of ..." and the bottom frame has the content.

[coditoergosum]

Oh yeah, good catch Pig. I forgot to include the method to actually take them to the page. I would use a header personally (I meant to include this in my original post). You will want to put the header() call at the top of the script to avoid getting "output already sent to browser" errors in the case that there's an error with the rest of your code... plus it would make it even more transparent if the first thing you do is redirect them. They are going to see the url briefly in the address bar, with the ugly gateway.php?url=www.blah.com url, and also in the status bar when they mouseover the link. The average user isn't going to think anything of it though... they don't know the difference.