You can get quite a bit of information about your visitors without having to use a third party tracking software. I'll outline the PHP commands you can use to capture some of this data. The details you capture can be saved into a database, and retrieved later to check your site's performance and user details. The following information is captured using the server variable ($_SERVER) which is available from PHP 4.10 onwards.

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Date Added: Oct 16, 2006 Hits: 18 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0

Often, in order to keep track of these traffic statistics a webmaster will use some sort of script or program which monitors visitors and creates reports based on their needs. These scripts can range in size and complexity from a simple hit counter on a page, to a fully integrated data-mining application. They can also range in price from free unsupported scripts, to thousands of dollars for an integrated system. In many cases though, the first option is relatively useless, and the second is unnecessary (and usually outside of the budget). As is true with many things in life, the best solution is usually somewhere in between.

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Date Added: Oct 16, 2006 Hits: 9 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0

Getting information about your visitors is interesting and sometimes useful for generating statistics, especially when you have a high traffic.

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Date Added: Oct 16, 2006 Hits: 12 Rating: 5.00 Votes: 1

Most of the popular site usage statistics analyzation software fall flat when attempting to perform some of the more complicated calculations and reporting. Many times we find ourselves wishing we could record and monitor some statistical information, and then not only have it displayed in a useful and meaningfully way, but also in a way that makes sense to us. Specifically my problems with the common webalizer apache log file parser, are its rough-around-the-edges support for referral logs and its handling of google search terms, as well as the complete absence of visually presented trend, or average, lines through time, and the fact that it is imposible to use webalyzer to view real-time information. On the other side there is the javascript based solutions, similar in implementation to "free counters" these setups require extra code be inserted into all of your pages and run on the client side (the number of things that could go wrong with this is a scary thought, given that most of the information can be gathered, safely, on the server-side).

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Date Added: Oct 16, 2006 Hits: 8 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0

safeReferral Function

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Date Added: Oct 16, 2006 Hits: 1 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0

Logging Your Website With PHP Using a Flat File

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Date Added: Oct 16, 2006 Hits: 47 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0

Learn how you can create a small and simple PHP script to log your visitors activity into a file. You just need to add 1 line to each of your page to enable logging and the statistics will be collected in a html file so you don't have to setup any database for this task.

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Date Added: Mar 31, 2007 Hits: 15 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0

Capturing click data is useful when you want to look at trends such as pages that are looked at the most, or amount of traffic.
To do this you would need to call the function below each time a page is loaded to capture the click data such as user ip, page title and url. Ofcourse you can capture more info here, for example date.
Further on you would need to save the click data in a database or text file (for example a csv file ready to be viewed in excel).

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Date Added: Nov 8, 2007 Hits: 6 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0