On Dec 18, 2007 6:05 AM, Zoran Bogdanov <test1.test1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > Is it possible to track how long has a single visitor been on my site? > > example: I go to www.somesite.com at 5.am and I exit the page (close my > browser or just go to another site) at 6.am. How do i track that 1 hour > period using PHP? > If you just want to track a single visitor, it might be easiest just to hire someone to go sit and watch them. :-) (Sorry -- I'm running on little sleep and couldn't resist.) Most often the stats packages that show how long a user visits a site do so by examining the server's log files and looking for the last page request by a particular user and the first request by the same user and subtracting. You can do the same by checking whether a session variable (or cookie) exists on every page and, if it does not, set that session variable equal to the current time stamp. Then on each successive request you could calculate how long it has been since they first visited your site. If you need to report on the time later, you'll need to store the times of each request to some persistent location, which is what the log files are doing. If you have access, you could read them; otherwise you can build your own log in a file or a database. Now, this won't tell you that after opened the last page I visit on your site I spent another 20 minutes viewing your content. For that matter, it doesn't guarantee that I actually read anything on your site at all -- just that I requested some pages and that the time between my first request and last request was one hour in your example. If you really need to know when I "close my browser or just go to another site" you'll need to add some JavaScript to send another request when the browser leaves your site. Andrew -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
