Hi,

I have been spending the last few days trying to work out hit counters. I am talking about the ones that are displayed on YouTube, under the videos. You know the one that says "Views : 222, 222"(for example).

I wanted to replicate this for my site. I want to show a video and under it, show how many views it has had.

There are many scripts available on the net but I'd rather try and make one myself as opposed to just using someone elses. This way I can further my understanding of PHP.

I know a little bit about PHP now, after reading up a LOT on the internet and W3SCHOOLS.

I have edited: No txt file is necessary. As mentioned by nyef, txt files are a bad idea for decent traffic websites, for that reason I am removing that idea.

Does anyone have any other solutions where I can show the views like YouTube does?

Thank you for your help.

Using a text file for something as ubiquitous as a hit counter is a bad idea. File system access is much much slower than memory. If your website starts getting decent traffic, every single page load by every single user will be writing to disk.

Store the counter in your database, or even better in memory.

Originally Posted by nyef

Using a text file for something as ubiquitous as a hit counter is a bad idea. File system access is much much slower than memory. If your website starts getting decent traffic, every single page load by every single user will be writing to disk.

Store the counter in your database, or even better in memory.

Can you explain?

Ok, I'll avoid the txt file. But, what's the alternative.

Well if you have a mysql database you can create a table in there with 2 columns: page and hits, then just create as many as you want and each time you get a hit that you want recorded just:

PHP Code:

$page = 'current_page.php';
$query="UPDATE `table_name` SET hits=hits+1 WHERE page=$page";
$result=mysql_query($query); 


Delete!