Free Visitor Tracker Script

[Andy]

Hi,

after many years I've finally made a new visitor tracker script in php. The cool thing about this one is that it auto-detects which page called the script and it provides a useful secondary function of providing your footer text which tends to change with time. So it's easy to make site-wide changes to your footer such as the year. Unlike alternatives, it doesn't use a 1 pixel-wide image which could possibly be a factor against page ranking.

Another cool feature is that it ignores direct access to the script from external sites to avoid the ever-growing problem of referral spam.

No database is needed either. And, because it's such a small script, you can have multiple instances of it on your site to track individual pages.

Even though I have webalizer site stats etc, I'm finding this very useful to check out hits on individual pages in real time to zoom in on what's going on.

Free Web Counter Script

[Queen Bee]

Hey Andy, this looks great. I think I am going to put this on my front page so I can see all of my referrals. I might actually consider putting it on all of my pages, but I wanted to ask you something: Does it slow load time at all? I had a statistics script from Sitestats.com that slowed down load time quite a bit.

Webalizer is not that great and only gives me a list of about 25 referrals from the sites that give me the most hits, but what I really want to see is all the small art/personal sites and forums that have linked to some of my pages.

I also found a "better" Webalizer made by someone else, but I have no idea how to install it. I'm afraid I'd mess up something I couldn't repair later (I'm not that great with this kind of stuff). This is why this script looks really promising to me.

[Andy]

Hi Tamuril,

glad you liked it 

I don't think it should impact on the page loading speed much since the code is small and runs on your site. If you use an external site for visitor stats then their server may be slow to respond since they are having to deal with large numbers of hits so they must throttle back the response speed to preserve their bandwidth.

[Queen Bee]

Hey Andy,

I'm going to give this a go later this week when I find the time.

A quick question: Can I hide it in one of my spacer images? The copyright text on my site is in graphic form, and below that is a spacer. I was wondering if I could put the code into my spacer image so I don't have to worry about any extra text (I know this is a bad way of doing things, but until I get the time to optimize my site, I'd prefer doing it this way).

Thanks again for the neat script. This will come in handy for me.

[Andy]

You can probably delete the echo "$s"; line at the end of the script so no text is output. I think this would work.

You can try it and feed back  In my case it's usefull to update the footer easily each year when the year changes. Another idea would be to use the script to output the date and time to your page.