Most viewed posts in the last 21 days - php

Question

I'm trying to create a blog system with php and I need a way of counting the most viewed post during the last 21 days. Does anybody know of a good way of doing this?
I don't have much experience with php so i need someone to point me in the right direction. I have tried to look into google anlytics API but it seems a bit complicated. Would it be easier to just use cookies?

Answer 1

Since you are building your own blog system, here is the simplest way to do it:
I assume that this is anonymous counting of your blog post visits. If you want to have ip logged records you'll have to adjust the business logic.
Create a new table called visits.
Add an id (Primary key), a field called blogpostid ( that will store the id of the post being viewed) and a field called dtpost with timestamp or datetime properties that upon insert will automatically put the date/time.
Now you can query like this:
select visits.blogpostid, count(dtpost) as counted from posts
left join posts on posts.id = visits.blogpostid
where dtpost between (NOW() AND <-21 days interval function>)
order by counted DESC group by visits.blogpostid;
What you really do is storing the datetime of someone visiting your blog post. This automatically is a count so whatever interval you put the between will fetch the data *. Then the count() function does the counting.
One thing to know is that your own browser refresh will add up to the counting of the visits so you'll have to provide a way to block counting the refresh of the browser (usually a time limit or a cookie to say that you have already seen that page).
*Edit:
Since this is ambiguous, what I mean is that it will fetch your data within the time period that you want.

Answer 2

Create a table views with a foreign key to post ids and add an entry with the visitors information and the date. Then you can fetch the most viewed posts like this (untested):
SELECT p.*, COUNT(p.*) count FROM posts p
INNER JOIN views v ON v.post_id = p.id
WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 21 DAY) <= p.date_viewed
ORDER BY count DESC
GROUP BY p.id;

Answer 3

To prevent the count from incrementing when viewed multiple times by the same user you can use the session meganism to prevent that from happening.
session_start();
if (!isset($_SESSION['posts_viewed'])) {
$_SESSION['posts_viewed'] = array();
}
// some logic to get to relevant post id here
// check that the post_id is not in the array
if (!in_array($post_id, $_SESSION['posts_viewed'])) {
// logic to increment a persistent counter (e.g. in mysql) here
// add post_id to array
array_push($_SESSION['posts_viewed'], $post_id);
}
// finally some logic that display the post here
session_close();