last visit tracker

[fishy]

Hey I am creating a little last visit tracker for my website.

Users don't log in to my site I was just sending a cookie to their browser when their each time they hit my home page. When you do this on a forum like this do they set that cookie timestamp as a session variable? because the last visit day usually stays the same. With my setup it changes immed after they visit the home page.

thanks

tom

[Roger_Ramjet]

Yes, sessions is the way to do that.

When they hit the homepage check for the session var, if it does not exist then read cookie, create session var and then reset cookie with current data and time. They can hit the home page as often as they want in a session then and last visit will not change, while this visit has already been recorded in the cookie for when they leave your site.

If you have a db then you can track visits that way, but that is not efficient for anonymous visitors as they can delete the cookie and you'll have untold redundant entries in the db.

[fishy]

Sweet,

Thanks for the explanation! Now to code it.

Tom