Question

I see on sites that they sometimes have a statistic showing how many views an article or downloads a file had over the last week. I think download.com does something like this. I was wondering how they go about doing this. Are they actually keeping track of every days downloads or am I missing something really basic?

Are they doing something like having three rows called total_downloads, last_week_downloads, this_week_downloads. Then every week, copying the value of this_week_downloads to last_week_downloads and then resetting this_week_downloads to 0?

Answer 1

There are a couple of ways to do it, depending on what your trying to get out of the stats.

One way is to include a visits column on your table, then just increase that number by 1 each time that article’s page is loaded.
This however isn’t very good for giving the past weeks number of views. You can do this in 2 ways:

1) another column in your table doing the same as visits, but run a cron job to put it back to 0 every week.

2) create another table which holds article_id, ip_address and timestamp, you would insert a record each time someone visits the article, storing their IP address (allowing you to roughly get page views and unique page views), and of course the timestamp allows you to query for only a sub-set of those records. Note: using this method you could store more information for stats, but it does require a lot more server resources.