I am trying to create a website which can track/analyze the visitor and gather as much information as possible about the visitor. I have already found services which were not free, but they have provided every piece of information about the user who is visiting the website.
Is there a solution for that which is free yet effective like the paid ones out there? Also, should I use client side or server side scripting? Which is more reliable?
The main reason that I'm trying to gather these information is because I'd like to know more about my website visitors and eliminate the fraudsters or cheaters by analyzing their information. Or is there another good solution for that?
I'm sorry if this is a weird question, I'm quite new in this field this is why I'd like to know more about it.
EDIT: I have already tried Google Analytics, but it is not really good in my case.
If you would like to Geo Locate your visitors, and discover their physical location based off their IP, MaxMind has a great service with a free option.
http://www.maxmind.com/en/geolocation_landing
Related
I am going to add page views count to my website, where views will be updated in the database. Previously, I have done similar think and I used users' ip address to determine unique views.
Now, I just wonder if I should use cookies instead. I can not understand which one is better. Or should I use both for more strictness?
Somebody with confident mind about this problem, please respond and I will accept your point of view. I just need a little bit more confidence to choose either one or second.
P.S. If you think there is better alternative to those two please be kind to tell me.
Thanks.
Use google analytics
Use somekind of http log reader/parser.
Take a look at http://www.phpmyvisites.us/
what happens when 5 PC's connect to your site from the same IP, let's say they are behind a wireless router, is that a good count ? what if the same person who viewed the page had an internet connection with dynamic IP like most broadband internet connections are today
cookies could do the job, but I'm not sure how to tackle this problem and why track at a client level where he navigated, cookies can also be deleted or blocked ...
an easy way would be to use google analytics or google webmaster tools
I am currently working on a special interest social network. The part that I'm having trouble with is the location of individual users.
My ideal solution would be a system where users enter their city/state and/or zip code, and could search for other users within their own area.
What I think separates my question from many existing threads is my needs and my resources. I don't have much capital at all to invest in a paid database, nor do i need all the features offered by the ones i've come across. I'm really looking for suggestions in which direction I need to go in. I've seen a lot of threads with similar ideas, but none that give the type of answers i need for my project. I'm not sure where to start with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated!!
Also, I'm building my application in php5.
these barebones hosting packages include MySQL... 1and1.com
so you could store the locations, and use the Haversine formula to find nearby users: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/phpsqlsearch.html#findnearsql
For getting the data in Lat/Lng format, you could consider using navigator.geolocation...it's fairly well supported, but you could do a test for it: if(navigator.geolocation) and if it's NOT, provide a text field for city/state or ZIP, and then geocode that to get to Lat/Lng (google has a service here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ ) but it does have some limitations, like 2500 queries/day unless you pay for an upgraded license
Actually, even if the navigator approach is available, you might want to provide a confirmation step (in case their ISP is returning an different location)...like "you appear to be HERE, is this accurate, or would you like to supply your own location"
Thank you Robot Woods, Your answer inspired some creative googling that lead me to the answer to my problem. Yahoo offers PlaceFinder! http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/
PlaceFinder can be used to get a Latitude/Longitude from a user inputted city/state combination or a zip code. And best of all... Its Free!!! Fits my budget perfectly!
I'm looking to have a user enter an app ID on a website, save the information from their app (my sql database), and then display that information on the website.
If anyone would mind sharing the code/process that would be used to do this or are there tutorials that you can point me in the direction of learning how to do this?
If you could help me out at all I will be very grateful. Thanks.
You CANNOT do this via screen scraping. Read Apple's Terms Of Use
Your Use of the Site You may not use
any “deep-link”, “page-scrape”,
“robot”, “spider” or other automatic
device, program, algorithm or
methodology, or any similar or
equivalent manual process, to access,
acquire, copy or monitor any portion
of the Site or any Content, or in any
way reproduce or circumvent the
navigational structure or presentation
of the Site or any Content, to obtain
or attempt to obtain any materials,
documents or information through any
means not purposely made available
through the Site. Apple reserves the
right to bar any such activity.
What you need to do is investigate Apple's Partner Program which includes a program for developers and I believe would grant you access to an API where you would be able to directly query for and receive the info you wanted (such as app descriptions) to display on your site and perhaps even get a commission for sales you generate when people purchase something from apple via links on your site etc.
Odds are that the other site you see which is displaying such info from Apple's store, has an affiliate/partner arrangement with apple. (and if not, it's just a matter of time till they get blocked from the site, find cease and desist letters in the mail from apple's laywers, get sued, or some combination of those three.
You should really look at these first.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/822380/how-legal-is-screen-scraping
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396778/legalities-of-screen-scraping
Knowing Apple, they'll probably sue you. They have sued for less. Or IOW who haven't they sued?
If you want to save the information to your database then you might want to look at the program Appfetcher at http://www.altraware.com.
It uses the Xml that apple provides so there should be no legality issues.
Lately geo-targeting has been pretty popular in technology. By IP, cell tower, GPS, using browser plugins, HTML5?, mobile devices ...
Since I'm about to add some geo-targeted features on our site, I wanted to know what's the best approach. Is there some API that uses a mix of all those technologies? Or at least, what API/service would you recommend I use?
The service I'm working on doesn't need to be 100% accurate, so I'm OK with geo-IP, but if there's an easy way to do better, why not.
Technologies used are php, javascript, ajax, java.
Whatever you do please please please don't set the language of your website based on the user's IP, and then make it almost impossible to change unless you know said language and you feel like wasting hours (like ebay and paypal, among others, do). Use the browser's language.
Not everyone in, let's say, France speaks or wants to speak French.
I guess it's not very related to your question but i felt the need to rant about this, sorry :)
GEO IP is probably the best approach for now.
HTML5 looks promising, but it'll be a while before it's widely supported. And even then it requires explicit user approval, which kind of limits the possibilities for using it (for example auto-redirecting to a country specific version of a website)
For a start try the free http://api.hostip.info?ip=x.x.x.x (www.hostip.info for website)
It'll give you city and country in a xml structur. I've a small proxy-script writen in PHP on the http-server, which a html page calls with ajax and show the infomation in text and on a Google map using the Google geocoding api. Later on you can easy replace the api.hostip.info with an other api.
I would use IP address detection by default, and then optionally ask for a more specific location using the Javascript/HTML5 navigator.geolocation API when present. (For example, in iPhone Safari)
Most users are still using devices that don't know the location themselves, so plugins that are available will not get a better location than IP address detection does anyway. (Alternatively, they'll prompt users to manually enter data, which is annoying)
Max Mind is good. But if you are looking for a free solution, you may want to consider using the javascript geocoder. Eventually they will support addresses and country, but right now, they only give you a latitude and longitude.
Basically, I want to display local events to people on a page. So if you were from California you would have different things than someone from Florida. I am going to be using php for the rest of the project so php is a must.
I would prefer to get the data without having to ask the user for additional information. IF I have to ask for additional information, I would want to use a zipcode than I would save that zipcode to a database with their ip so I didn't have to ask again.
I would imagine the GEO IP functions would get you 90% of the way there, if not all the way.
How will you know the location of the person?
For example, you can't go by the ISP, as their ISP address may be in a different state than the user.
If they have to log in then you can know where they were when they logged in, but what if the are on a trip and so staying elsewhere, now your information is wrong.
That would be the first challenge.
Depending on how fine-grained you are trying to get will determine what your database looks like. For example, while I am going down a street, if I am using a mobile device, will you be able to use my GPS data to determine what gluten-free restaurant is close to me? Or is it based on a city or metropolitan area?
Are you using GPS data?
How will you get the local events to update your application?
There is a great deal of information left unanswered to be able to really give you a good answer.
Are you trying to guess the visitor's location? If that is what you want, see the PHP GeoIP extension or MaxMind GeoIP api. They both use the same database and offer free and paid databases.
One problem with this method is that the IP address does not guarantee an accurate location. It is often a good starting point though. You should make it easy for the visitor to correct their location.
A potentially more accurate method is to use the HTML5 geolocation api, but this is experimental and only supported in the latest browsers. Even with browser support, the site visitor needs hardware capable of finding their location or a plugin that allows them to set their own location. If you go this route you should have a fall back based on the GeoIP result.
You could look up their IP address in a geolocation database like other people have mentioned, and as everyone has pointed out, it's not foolproof but it should work most of the time.
You could also take a look at using Firefox's location-aware browsing, which again isn't foolproof -- yet it does accurately pinpoint my very house when I use it. Of course, this would only work for Firefox 3.0+ users, and only after they click the "accept" button, so it's obviously not without issues.
Whichever way you choose to go, just make sure there's an override somewhere! Your method might work 99% of the time, but if I'm in the 1% of people who are never shown the right information, that'd be really really annoying!