Measuring Page Popularity

When I wanted to set up popularity ranking at my http://oakpointcommunity.org, I decided to expand upon code that I already use here. I like the results, and will someday get around to doing the same thing here.

The first task is to track page visits. I use a Perl database for that. Here's the section that does page tracking:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-TYPE: text/html\n\n";
$thispage=$ENV{REQUEST_URI};
... (unrelated code)
open(LOCKF, "\>$sitedata/opcsclock");
flock LOCKF,2;
dbmopen(%sites,"$sitedata/opcsitecounts",0666);
dbmopen(%siterips,"$sitedata/opcsiterip",0666);
@exstat=split ":",$sites{$thispage};
my $rip=$ENV{REMOTE_ADDR};
# $siterips{$thispage} looks like this: "82.99.30.50:66.31.145.227:72.74.95.127:65.54.97.151:24.218.209.170:24.60.229.77"
if ($siterips{$thispage} !~ /$rip/) {

# haven't seen this ip recently on this page

}
dbmclose %sites;
dbmclose %siterips;
flock LOCKF,8;
close LOCKF;

That's simple enough. At midnight a cron job clears out daily counters, resets weekly if it's Sunday, etc:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$now=time();
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)=localtime($now);
dbmopen(%sites,"$sitedata/sitecounts",0666);
dbmopen(%opcsites,"$sitedata/opcsitecounts",0666);
open(LOCKF, ">$sitedata/opcsclock");
flock LOCKF,2;
foreach(keys %opcsites) {

}
dbmclose %opcsites;
flock LOCKF,8; close LOCKF;

With these two in place, we have everything needed to produce the "popular" page. Here's the internal code that orders the pages:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-TYPE: text/html\n\n";
dbmopen(%sites,"$sitedata/opcsitecounts",0666);
@stuff=();
$count=0;
foreach (keys %sites) {

dbmclose %sites;
$x=0;
@s=();
foreach (reverse sort @stuff) {

This lets a page with good hits recently compete with sites that have had a lot of hits in the past. It also calculates a "*" count to give a visual indication of relative popularity. Of course you can tweak the multipliers to give more or less weight to the various buckets. One change I implemented involves giving a boost to "today" when it exceeds the average for the day.

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"Measuring Pageity " Copyright September 2007 Tony Lawrence

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