Difference between revisions of "PHP-and-MySQL/C4/Simple-Visitor-Counter/English-timed"
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Revision as of 12:03, 10 July 2014
| Time | Narration |
| 00:00 | Welcome to this tutorial on a page counter. |
| 00:02 | This will count how many people have visited your page per refresh. |
| 00:07 | So every time someone enters the page, a value will be incremented, will be stored in a text file and it will be displayed to the user. |
| 00:15 | Or you can keep it to yourself. Its your choice whether you want to display. |
| 00:19 | Please note, this is a very simple way of doing this. |
| 00:21 | It won't count unique visitors. |
| 00:23 | I'll make a unique visitors tutorial soon. |
| 00:27 | It'll probably be available by the time you are viewing this. |
| 00:30 | So check it out. It will be more specific. |
| 00:33 | It deals with IP addresses. |
| 00:35 | However, for now this is a basic counter tutorial and its using file-storage as opposed to database-storage. |
| 00:42 | Ok. So the first thing we need to do is create a file in which to store our value in. |
| 00:48 | There are 2 ways to do this. |
| 00:50 | Either right-click and create a new text document. |
| 00:53 | Or what I'll show you is how to create a file for opening, which is the function 'fopen'. |
| 00:59 | And we'll store it in the file variable. But its not manadatory. |
| 01:05 | And we'll say count.php and another parameter for this is whether you want it for writing, for reading or to append that, for example. |
| 01:22 | So, I'll say for writing. |
| 01:26 | Ok. Now I'll say 'fwrite' and I'll write to file and I'll create a value of zero. |
| 01:36 | So, now we'll open our page-up and refresh. |
| 01:41 | We've got counter.php. Click on that and when we go back see if we've got count.php |
| 01:49 | So, .txt |
| 01:51 | So, lets refresh this. |
| 01:54 | Ok, so now we should have a .txt file. |
| 02:00 | Let me remove this - count.php. |
| 02:05 | Now we've done that and we really don't need this code. |
| 02:08 | So I'll delete this part but I'll retain this and now I'll say I want to read from the file. |
| 02:14 | You could type this manually also. You just have to create a file for writing instead of reading. |
| 02:22 | So, we've got our file and we've got our value of zero in it. |
| 02:26 | So, lets open it and see. |
| 02:28 | Yes, we've got count.txt with zero that will read this and put it into that. |
| 02:34 | So, now, I need to get the contents of the file. |
| 02:37 | So, instead of 'fopen' I'll say, 'file_get_contents'. |
| 02:42 | So, I'll type 'file_get_contents'. |
| 02:44 | And that will get the contents of 'count.txt'. |
| 02:48 | Ok. Then I'll say 'echo' and use the variable and I'll say 'echo file'. |
| 02:52 | Now what this will do is it will say file_get_contents and it will get the contents of our text file with our count variable in there. |
| 03:02 | And it will say echo out the contents of the file. |
| 03:05 | So, lets go back to our page and we will refresh. |
| 03:07 | Click on counter and we've got zero at the moment. |
| 03:10 | Refreshing. Its still staying at zero as displayed here. |
| 03:14 | If I change this to 'hello' and I went back to our page and refreshed, it'll have the value 'hello'. |
| 03:20 | So, we are just echoing out whatever is in this text file at the moment. |
| 03:25 | And right now its zero - the integer zero. |
| 03:30 | Now to echo this, I'll say 'You've had file visitors'. |
| 03:37 | So, that will give us something like that. |
| 03:40 | Now, what I'll do is I will create a new variable called 'visitors'. |
| 03:46 | And I'll say that is equal to 'file'. |
| 03:50 | I'll put this up here to be more efficient and easy to read as well. |
| 03:55 | And I'll say 'visitors' and we can tell what this is going to be. |
| 04:00 | And then what we'll say is visitors |
| 04:05 | Visit-ors - new - equals this vistors plus 1. |
| 04:14 | So this will be our new value. |
| 04:17 | Then I'll go ahead and say 'filenew', so I'm creating a new file. |
| 04:22 | I'll open that as count.txt because that's what it is. |
| 04:27 | And I'll say to write this file. |
| 04:30 | Now if it was 'a+' that means 'append' - so I'm appending something onto the file, which means that I'm adding to it. |
| 04:38 | What I want to do is overwrite, so I'll put 'w'. |
| 04:42 | And then I'll say 'fwrite' like we did in our first part - to 'filenew'. |
| 04:47 | And the value that I need to write is 'visitorsnew'. |
| 04:50 | This is going to work. Lets just go through it before you run it. |
| 04:55 | We've got our main file and that's getting the contents of our count.txt which is zero at the moment. |
| 05:04 | We're setting our variable called 'visitors' to the contents of the file. |
| 05:07 | We're echoing out to the user how many visitors there have been. |
| 05:11 | And we're creating a new variable with the 'visitors + 1' - namely the person that is viewing this page at the moment. |
| 05:20 | That becomes significant. That's the person adding the extra 1 in there. |
| 05:24 | And then we're opening a new file as we saw in the start of this tutorial but instead we're using 'w' for write. |
| 05:32 | Then we're writing to our new file the new value which is increment of 1. |
| 05:37 | So, lets refresh and you can see - oh!. |
| 05:41 | Its not working! |
| 05:42 | Ok, so lets check this code. |
| 05:44 | Lets check the spelling of visitors - Visit-ors new. Ok. Visit-ors. |
| 06:01 | That's the reason. I had to put a 'n' there. |
| 06:06 | So, count.txt. |
| 06:07 | Now this time, we are adding 1 each time we refresh. |
| 06:12 | You can see that the value is in fact going up. |
| 06:16 | Now obviously, to reset this, all you would have to do is - |
| 06:19 | Ah! a warning. 'count.txt' has been changed because we have edited it. |
| 06:24 | I'll say 'reload from disk'. |
| 06:27 | And its changed to 19, as you can see, it displayed 18 there. |
| 06:30 | The reason is that we're echoing this out before we put our new value in. |
| 06:35 | So, for maximum efficiency and to get the actual correct value I'll put this code down there. |
| 06:41 | As matter of fact, when I am refreshing here and lets say, we get to 25 visitors and we come back here, we'll have the value 26. |
| 06:51 | Ok, well, maybe I'm being a little disorganised here. |
| 06:55 | There's no major efficient way to do it. |
| 06:57 | This will always echo out 'visitors' |
| 06:59 | So just for variation, we'll say 'visitors_new'. |
| 07:07 | So, this will equal exactly - oh no! |
| 07:11 | visitors new - another spelling mistake. |
| 07:16 | Right, so lets increment to 35 and we're going to contents and this value equals 35. |
| 07:24 | Position isn't everything when you have to deal with a code as simple as this but it does help. |
| 07:30 | Ok - so that's the basic tutorial. |
| 07:32 | If you'd like to get any help on it, then please get in touch. |
| 07:35 | But for now, try this out, give it a go. |
| 07:37 | Also watch my other tutorial on the more advanced counter that takes IP addresses into account. |
| 07:43 | Thanks for watching. This is Osama Butt dubbing for the Spoken Tutorial Project. |
