Hit Counter

This tutorial will show you how to create a way of tracking the unique visitor(s) to your site using Mimesis. NOTE: this is the actual code used on the main page of the Mimesis site.

STRUCTURE

This functions as a stand-alone script which you can cut and paste into an existing PHP page.

CODE

<?php
require_once('mimesis/Mimesis.php');

$cwd = realpath(dirname(__FILE__));	// The location where you want the table to be created (the directory where this script resides will suffice)
$tableName = 'hits';	// The name of the table
$rowLabel = str_replace('.', '_', $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);	// The label for the row

$mimesis = new Mimesis($cwd, $tableName, 'ts_' . $tableName, 0644);	// Instantiate Mimesis
if(!$mimesis->lock(1)){	// If the table doesn't lock display an error
	echo 'HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error';
}else{
	if(!$mimesis->tableExists() || false === $mimesis->getRow($rowLabel, $rowLabel)){	// Check if row already exists
		if(false === $mimesis->insertRow(array($rowLabel => array(null)))){	// If table fails to create display an error
			echo 'HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error';
		}
		if(!$mimesis->release()){	// Release lock on table
			echo 'HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error';
		}
	}
}
if($mimesis->tableExists()){
	echo end($mimesis->entries());	// Display the number of entries which is equivalent to the number of hits
}
?>

KEY CONCEPTS

Some of the important things to keep in mind when viewing this code are the following:

We use the IP address as provided by the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] to create the row labels for our entries
The entries we store are null arrays because we don't really care for any information other than the uniqueness of the IP address
We test to see if an IP address already exists in our table by checking for its label
To count the number of unique visitors we retrieve the number of unique rows in the table
Permission 0644 are used in this example because on the 110mb.com server this corresponds to the most accessible php script permissions
The lock performed here is a polling lock, which means it won't stop trying until it acquires a lock on the table OR the script times out
We display errors in every possible location where one might occur