Are these things possible? (stats)

Tea_J

I want to make a really detailed and realtime stats thingy...

so i was wondering if these are possible and what's the best way to achieve them

1) Tell where the visitor is coming from (by country and city

2) What OS the user is on

3) How long he was online

4) if coming from a search engine, WHAT KEYWORD WAS USED? (really would like to achieve this feature)

any inputs would be gladly appreciated.. actually i do have a great deal of idea about these.. but i wanted to hear your thoughts for a newbie's point of view.

thanks all!

tea

AndrewWest

I don't know about all of it, but if you go by city the more times then none there's no guaruntee it's accurate. IP's read back to the ISP. Which could be bounced all the way accrossed the country.

Ravenous

Yes.. It's possible, but, generally, you'll need to pay for the service. Check out GeoIP.
Yes, this is possible, but it can easily be spoofed. I think the infomration is sent in the HTTP headers each time a page is requested. I don't recall how to grab the information with PHP, though.
No, this is not normally possible. HTTP is a stateless protocol. Perhaps it could be worked out with PHP sessions, but this would be a sort of hack. In other words, this ability is not built into the protocol.
Yes, this is possible. However, it will probably require custom programming on your end. Get the referring URL with $_SERVER['referer'] and parse through that. There may be scripts already available that do this, but I don't know fo any off the top of my head.
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TheDefender

Re: the city thing... even GEOIP reports my IP as a city that is 90 miles away, and in the mountains, whereas I am in the flatlands... One example of where this doesn't help is if I used a city to pull a specific weather feed, and that city is polled off of my IP... That will never work for accurate weather info, because of the climate differences between the cities (and it is significant).

Tea_J, how much of a newb are you? This is quite an undertaking for a newbie... (No offense)

luke9_20

There's a really good stats viewer I know of that does almost all of that available at http://www.shauninman.com/mentary/past/shortstat_again.php - you might wanna take a look at the source to this program, it's pretty good and then you can write some features that do similar activity based on his source code.... or just use his stat viewer.

Tea_J

thanks everyone for the feedback.

Re: the city thing... even GEOIP reports my IP as a city that is 90 miles away, and in the mountains, whereas I am in the flatlands... One example of where this doesn't help is if I used a city to pull a specific weather feed, and that city is polled off of my IP... That will never work for accurate weather info, because of the climate differences between the cities (and it is significant).

Well, i kinda thought so..

Tea_J, how much of a newb are you? This is quite an undertaking for a newbie... (No offense)

Oh, 🙂 none taken mate.. well, not really a newbie i wouldnt think since, i've been talking php for over 3 years and i've cooked up some quite powerful applications for both web and desktop using php.. however, i am not a GURU as to know everything at anytime.. Not to mention handling development in different technologies (php, flash,xml,java, etc) from a-z.. i do tend to forget.. sometimes i merely wish to be reminded.. sometimes to be update (i knew it was impossible to accurately tell what city the visitor is coming from before, but i dunno about today's capabilities), and a lot of times, i admit, i certainly have not tackled before.. such as grabbing keywords from search queries..
as for my newbie-like way of asking things, well, it's a habit that has proven useful in many situations before.. simple questions that i need clues on only.. then i do my own indept research to getting what i really wanted.. wink

and sometimes i ask peepz to post basic/sample code snippets to see what other people's coding habits are and stuffs..

anyways, thanks for asking though, it's cool to have cleared this issue..

@
thanks for the link.. .

anwyays, back to my questions..

isnt there away to achieve no 1 (w/o the city defining function) by ourselves and not have to pay?? How does one know about the location anyways?? (this one i admit i really dont know).. I mean, i would think that it records IP, and checks it against a list of ip ranges under certain countries.. am i right?

tea

luke9_20

That link I gave to the ShortStat stats viewer has a CVS file in it that you can import into a database that has IP information as to what country it belongs to. You can then catch the users IP and compare it to the one stored in the database to find which country that IP belongs to... if that helps ya.

Tea_J

ahh.. yes.. i just download his source code and im now studying his methods.. 🙂 thanks very much luke9_20.. for just 5 posts young on here, you've already been very helpful to me. rock on dude.

Tea

luke9_20

hey, you're welcome. yeah, I've been coming in every now and then but I never started an account, I just did recently cause I need a little help with a better way to do a small script for my blogging system and couldnt find anything related to what i was looking for anywhere else.

Tea_J

well, welcome to the community! 🙂 it's a great one..

Tea

TheDefender

Hey, sorry if I offended you Tea_J. I was just curious since you referred to yourself as a newbie in your original post...

"for a newbie's point of view"

Tea_J

lolz.. no offense taken.. none at all man.. 🙂

it's cool.

tea