Tracking visitors

neville

How do I track from which site did a visitor land on my site. If there is a link to my site on a page of some other site, I would want to store that Url and if its a repeat then increment the value against that url.

Is this possible ?

[deleted]

Read the manual of your Webserver.

The webserver log contains all the information about all the hits to your site.
You can simply read the file and get all the info you want.

Anon

Alternatively, create a file with

<?
phpinfo();
?>

This will show all the variables you can use.

The one you are looking for is $HTTP_REFERER

Nick

[deleted]

My point was that far too many people are writing code to fetch information that the webserver is already storing itself.

it's all there for the taking, so why re-invent the wheel? 🙂

neville

I may be wrong here, but i think That the file you are refering to is the
"../apache group/apache/logs/access.log" file.
I was wondering if I will have the rights to access this file since I don't have the neeed privs on my ISP's server.

how can I read a file that has been stored outside of the folder that I have rights to?

Thanks.

[deleted]

Quite correct. Any sensible ISP will give his clients access to their logs.
Your site runs as a seperate (virtual) server anyway, so they can easily give you a copy of the log.

Just ask for it. Saves you a a lot of work.

Anon

I don't have access to my logs, but have found that a database is more flexible than working off text files.

I can put in queries and get the results without running through an entire file.

I can get results for specific dates, again not having to run through an entire file.

The logs also contain information that I am not interested in (which gifs were requested etc).

The wheel doesn't need to be re-invented, just needs to perform better at the higher speeds we can now put it under.

:-)

Anon

Im a newbie at php and im just toying with the idea you mentioned. I cant get it going though :\

I coded the following lines but it wont go for some reason:

<?php
$refer = "Heya, I see you came from $HTTP_REFERER";
echo $refer;
?>

Yet the next one, almost the same, goes.

<?php
$browser = "Heya, I see you are using $HTTP_USER_AGENT";
echo $browser;
?>

I look in my phpinfo and the $HTTP_REFERER isnt listed...infact there arent a huge amount of these $blahblah's listed. How would I go about adding the $HTTP_REFERER command ? Perhaps my $HTTP_REFERER script is simply wrong ?

thanks