I run a local directory website (think yelp/yell.com etc) and need to provide analytical data to the businesses listed on the site.
I need to track the following:
1) Number of visitors to specific pages (ie: Jim's widgets was viewed 65 times)
2) Number of times a user clicks a link (ie: 25 users clicked to visit your website)
I am able to do this by simply adding one to the relevant number every time an action occurs.
What I would like to be able to do is split this into date ranges, for example, last 30 days, last 12 months, all time.
How do I store this data in the database? I only need the theory, not the code! If someone can explain the best way to store this information, I would be extremely grateful.
For example, do I use one table for dates, one for the pages/links and another for the user data (links clicked/pages visited)? The only solution I have so far is to add a new row to the DB every time one of these actions happens, which isn't going to scale very well.
Thanks to anyone that can help.
I would not reinvent the wheel and use an already available solutions such as Piwik. It can actually read your normal weblogs to provide all the information you asked for.
If for some reason you still need a custom solution, I would not save the tracking data in ranges, but rather use exact time and url-data for each individual page call (what your normal weblog provides). The cumulated data should be generated on-the-fly in your logic section, e.g. through a SQL-view:
SELECT count(url),url
FROM calllog
WHERE calldate > NOW()-30days
Related
I'm looking for coding my own PHP URL shortener. I have already built a system that knows to take a long URL, turn it into a shortened one (something like domain.com/go/URLID) and count the total click activity for it.
I want to add features like:
Daily usage graph (like Google Analytics shows visitor graph in a month).
Unique clicks count.
As I said, the code I made stores the total counts, but I'm not sure how to count unique clicks.
My approach for unique click counts is to use IP or cookies, but I'm not sure which one is more reliable (as cookies may expire and IP will count a full household as repeating clicks). How can I build this?
And the other part of click statistics by day: How can I do it? I was thinking about a very VERY long database table that stores every URL click, but I guess it will be too long, The queries will take time (and I have 300MB table size limit from my server provider).
I would like to get some help with the thing.
I don't mind using external but free services (as long as I can use my own domain, of course).
Thanks!
I'll try to explain my question the best way I can.
I'm not asking for codes, only for the best method of doing it.
I want to create a browser game and use time for upgrading stuff, building etc.
For example, to build 1 house will take 1 hour.
So I will began with saving the timestamp+(60*60) at the moment the user did his action.
My question is, how to update it the best way?
One way I thought of was to add function that check every page view of the user if it's done.
But then if he's not logged in the update wont happen.
Second way i thought about is for every page view of any user to check for every user registered. But it's not effective and there is a problem if no user is logged in.
Any suggestions?
I had my game doing it simply, without crons.
When a player wanted something that takes time, i just updated his database information with the appropriate time of ending that job (columns are just examples)
UPDATE player SET jobend = UNIX_TIMESTAMP() + (60*60*4) # ending in 4 hours
Then, every page that had an information about the remaining time, i just used something like this:
SELECT (jobend - UNIX_TIMESTAMP()) AS jobremaining FROM player
I formatted correctly the time using strftime and i displayed that to the user.
In the case the remaining time was negative, the job was done.
There was no-need for absolute counting since user was able to do something with the job when he was connected.
When the player just changed pages or doing something else i had a function where i just checked all timely events while the user was online (so to catch any negative timer), then presented with javascript any change (i posted javascript counters for every page)
Now, if you talk about updating in real-time, cron is the way but are you sure you're going to need it for a game? I asked that question myself too and the answer was not.
EDIT
If another player sees the buildings on schedule page (an hypothetical page) i am doing the same calculations; if a time just got negative for a specific player (regardless if another player see the page), i just reward him with the building (in database i make all the changes), even if he's offline. There's no harm in this, since he can't do anything anyway. The other players will just see he has a building. The key here is that i execute the required updating PHP code regardless of player's connection to the game; as long at least ONE player is logged-in i'm executing the progress function for everything.
This isn't so slow as it sounds (updating all players by using just a connected player that visits a specific page). You just have a table of 'jobs' and check timers against the current time. More like a single query of getting the negative ones.
I'm currently looking for the BEST and SMOOTHEST way to get the active users on my website using a particular page. (purpose: think game lobby).
I was thinking about storing each visitor in a table, with their IP-adress as primary key in the database, together with a lastAction field - which stores a timestamp of their last action.
Gathering the active users would then simply just be to gather all rows where the last action was within the correct amount of time.
The problem: people on the same network (same IP) would be identified as the same user - it'd be hard to tell if they actually were a real person or just a page refresh with an old session. You get the idea.
I'm looking for smoother ways to separate users, or preferably, get away from the whole IP-adress part. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
Why not use a session based algorithm to determine the count of 'active users'? If you setup your session handler to write to a database (instead of flatfile), you can run queries against rows within the table to determine how many visitors and which page they are currently viewing.
You can read about how to switch your session handler here, but it does appear to be outdated. I suspect more googling will result in newer implementations.
I wonder if this is a good solution for a medium size social site. Its about managing online/offline indications of users. My solution is to include a script on each page that first of all updates the "last activity" field of the current user with a timestamp, then i select all users that havent been active within the session expire time(but is still online accordingly to the table) and sets the online flag(in db) to false. Is this a solution that is commonly used or will the sever load be to much when a bigger amount of users are navigating throug the site? Is there any better solution? Be aware that im not only intrested in the amount of online users but also names, therefore a session based script seems to complicated and inaccurate.
Thanks in advance!
It is good enough but better you could store this information in activity table: for any active user insert/update a row with his user_id and for inactive for more than N minutes one - remove rows.
A table that stored sessions should contain a field called "LAST_ACTIVITY_DATE", TIMESTAMP. So whenever they load a new page or you update something with AJAX, just update LAST_ACTIVITY_DATE with current_timestamp.
Then when you need to get online users, get those who have last_activity_date within 5 minutes from Current_timestamp.
Easy as!
Whats the best way to keep track of how many users and guests are online? Im making a forum for fun and learning
Right Now I have a 2 fields in the users table called is_online and last_access_time.
If current time is 5 minutes or more than last_access_time i set is_online it to zero. And if the signed in user refreshes browser i set it to 1.
But what about guests? I wanna keep track on how many guests are on also
Another thing that would be really cool is to show what page the user is viewing. and on the page, forum thread for example, 5 guests, Homer and Shomer are viewing this page. But how should i structure this? Hmm maybe i should make another question for that.
i dont know what i should do
What do you suggest?
I'd use cookies for this. Set a cookie when the user enters (checking first to make sure one doesnt exist). Easy way to generate a unique id for that user is to hash their IP plus the current time.
$id = md5($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . time());
Store that id in your database and use that to reference
You can check what page they are viewing by grabbing either $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] or $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] near the top of your php source. Store that in the table. I'd take a look at php.net's explanation of whats stored in the _SERVER global, as it should help out quite a bit if you find that you need more then just the document they are on (ex index.php). Found here.
You may need to pull apart of the query string that was used to access that page, parse out the variables to determine the page they are requesting. Either way, this could all be done through cookies, or just use a single cookie to store the unique id and use your table for storing everything else.
You cannot know for certain which page a user is viewing, but you can keep track of which page they last viewed. Every time you deliver a page to a user, record that page's path in a database row associated with them. Voila.
To keep the number of guests, I suggest tracking the number of distinct unauthenticated IP/HTTP-User-Agent combinations seen on a certain page in the last X minutes.
I found this article on Web Monkey that might help you.
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/how_many_users_are_on_your_site_right_now/