Question

I am programming a Blog. I am interested how to add a counter to the side to see how many people read the different articles.

I understood that if you have a Website counter, than you would normally save the IP and the Date in the database so you only count the person once.

But how would I make sure that a person reading a specific article is only counted once for that article?

The database would turn very big if I would save each Visitor IP for each Article. It came now into my mind to maybe create a Session for every Visitor. Within this Session I save each ArticleID the Person read. So before I update the counter in the database, I check if it already exists in Session – if not increment counter and save in Session otherwise dont.

Is this the right approach or is there another way to do it?

Answer 1

I would set a cookie on the user’s browser and send it to the server. If the cookie is new, it’s a new user reading the article for the first time.