Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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   PHP stats
Monday, September 17 2007
Up until about a week ago I had been using an ASP-based web statistics system I'd written to track hits and referrals to my site and others. It utilized the simple time-honored system of embedded image tags with URLs calling a script on a web server that then logged the hit (and any referral data) into a database. The alternative to this real-time logging system would have been a log analyzer for raw server logs. But I don't always have access to such logs, and installing a web-based analyzer has not always been possible for my improvised system of hosting providers. My homemade solution (which was similar to the old Nedstat system) worked well enough for my purposes. I'd even implemented a permissions system to keep the stats private and allow others to track their own stats separately. For a long time this system was part of the Vodkatea.com constellation of ASP-based community tools, but when Vodkatea went kaput I moved the stat system into a folder of Bathtubgirl.com. Now, though, Bathtubgirl is on a long-term hiatus while the girl behind it attends to something more womanly: the raising of an infant daughter. So I've had to move the stats system yet again.
As part of my emerging open source server-side Swiss Army Knife, about a year ago I'd built a primitive system for tracking web stats using PHP and a MySQL database. Today I found it took very little work to turn this into a complete replacement for my old ASP-based solution (here's its main function library, though these depend on a large number of other custom functions, some of which are here.). In some ways this PHP-based system is actually better, because there's now no longer a need to create a tracker before using it; all tracker embeds on all tracked pages contain exactly the same code, and if the tracker doesn't exist it will be built on the fly. (The building of things on the fly, as needed, has become an important part of my development methodology in recent years.)


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070917

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