What brings people to my web site?

How busy is your web site? How do people find it? Where do they arrive from? If you have access to your log files and they're using the "combined" format that tells you about the referer, you'll have that information - but hidden deeply in what's likely to be a huge file.

Here's a little bit of PHP code that you could put at the top of a page that you're particularly interested in tracking; it'll let you keep a log of how many visits you get from where, maintaining a very simple data file that you can look at from time to time, and reset when you want to start counting again.



<?php



/* Page to report keep tabs of all the various referers */



/* Find the referer */



$whence = $_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER];

if (! $whence) $whence = "-";



$previous = file("reflist.txt");

$repeat = 0;



// If this is a previously know referer, add 1 to the count



for ($k=0; $k
        $wl = explode(" ",$previous[$k]);

        if ($wl[0] == $whence) {

                $ncount = $wl[1] + 1;

                $previous[$k] = "$whence $ncount\n";

                $repeat = 1;

        }

}



// If this is a new referer, add it to the know list



if (! $repeat) {

        array_push($previous,"$whence 1\n");

        $ncount = 1;

        }



// Save the new counts



$fh = fopen("reflist.txt","w");

fputs ($fh,implode("",$previous));

fclose($fh);



// Send out the response page (sample)



?>



<body>

<h1>Headline information

This is visit number <?= $ncount ?> from <?= $whence ?><br>

<a href=/demo/fromwhere.php>Reload linking from here</a><br><br>

<h2>Full information ...</h2>

<?= join("<br>",$previous) ?>

</body>

You may Access the demo from here
(written 2005-07-13 06:16:14)

Associated topics are indexed under

H112 - PHP - Further Web Page and Network Handling
A606 - Web Application Deployment - Apache - log files and log file tools
G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility

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