Track Your Visitors, Using PHP

By Dennis Pallett
2005-05-26

Getting the information

The most important part is getting the information from your visitor. Thankfully, this is extremely easy to do in PHP (or any other scripting language for that matter). PHP has a special global variable called $_SERVER which contains several environment variables, including information about your visitor. To get all the information you want, simply use the following code:


// Getting the information
$ipaddress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$page = "http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}"; 
$page .= iif(!empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']), "?{$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']}", "");
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$datetime = mktime();
$useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$remotehost = @getHostByAddr($ipaddress);

As you can see the majority of information comes from the $_SERVER variable. The mktime() (http://nl2.php.net/mktime) and getHostByAddr() (http://nl2.php.net/manual/en/function.gethostbyaddr.php) functions are used to get additional information about the visitor.

Note: I used a function in the above example called iif(). You can get this function at http://www.phpit.net/code/iif-function.

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