I haven't had chance to have

greg — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:19:17 +0000

I haven't had chance to have a full test, but the serialize() seems like the solution to my issue.

Cheers

if the page view requires a

netsperience — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:55:46 +0000

if the page view requires a log in you could append the viewer's user id

but not if it is being anonymously viewed

just a random thought

Doing it by IP address is

pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:30:37 +0000

Doing it by IP address is probably a bad idea because if a profile gets hit several times by a large network (different users), it will only count as one. Same for a popular proxy.

The cookie method isn't fool proof either because someone can just clear cookies to increase their page's count, but I think it is the best option.

I would create a PHP array with the profile IDs as the keys, so when a page is viewed, run something like this:

<?php
$viewed_profiles[$profile_id] = true;
?>

Then to see if the page was view before, just test if that index exists.

<?php
if (isset($viewed_profiles[$profile_id]))
{
// profile was viewed before
}
else
{
// profile was not viewed before
}
?>

If you are having trouble storing arrays in cookies, I would just serialize it first. At the end of your script, do something like this:

<?php
$viewed_profiles = serialize($viewed_profiles);
setcookie('viewed_profiles', $viewed_profiles);
?>

Then, at the top of the page, run something like this to retrieve it:

<?php
if (isset($_COOKIE['viewed_profiles']))
{
$viewed_profiles = unserialize($_COOKIE['viewed_profiles']);
}
else
{
$viewed_profiles = array();
}
?>