PHP web statistics

[newmand2]

I asked a while back if anyone knew some good web stats applications, and I found a couple. However, I woould like to go about creating my own small applications. I only really care about the number of unique vistitors and their referrers. That would be my direct data capture, although I guess things such as browser, resolution etc would be cool. Anyways, I have unlimited MySQL Dbs, but I'd rather log it in a txt file, so could anyone give me some pointers?

Thanks

[Nightfire]

You could open up the apache log file and then just do some sorting out with that. Would be more accurate and contains all the info you need.

[Spookster]

Pointer number 1: Don't log it in a text file unless you implement some way of starting a new file after it reaches a certain size. It can bog down your site if the file gets too large or if you have heavy traffic.

Pointer number 2: Use the Apache log file as Nightfire suggested. Many web traffic analysis programs parse the apache log file to get their data. It's not hard as the log file format is pretty standard which makes it easy to pull the data you want. This option eliminates the need to store data in a text file thus eliminates the need to use pointer number one above.

[newmand2]

Ok thanks alot, ill check it out