A simple hit counter using PHP and Cookies

I like to think I’m a pretty damn good programmer (and that’s the kind of line that gets me the ladies, oh yeah). I need to be. It’s my job, and that’s what I sit here and do all day. I figure out how to engineer a problem into submission, and then I floor it with the awesome power of code and rock n’ roll.

Yet, in the 5 or so years that I’ve been coding in PHP, I have never once used cookies. Never. Never ever. I just haven’t ever had a reason to. Until last week. Cue ominous music.

My friends Christi & Mike needed a counter for the bottom of their wedding website powered by Wordpress. I tried looking for some open source solutions but they were all too complicated (in the sense that I didn’t care for all the crap being reported) so I decided to write one myself. It’s pretty simple– it checks to see if a cookie is set indicating that you’ve already been counted, and if not, it increments a counter and writes it to a flat file. Since this is Wordpress, this section of code goes in header.php before any headers have been output (cookies must always be set before any headers are output):

  5 // open the counter log, get the existing count and close the file
  6 $data = file('counterlog.txt');
  7 $total_visits = $data[0];
  8 $unique_visits = $data[1];
  9
 10 // check to see if we’ve already set a cookie for this user
 11 if(!isset($_COOKIE['counted'])){
 12     // reopen the file, overwrite the counts and close the file
 13     $fp = fopen(’counterlog.txt’, ‘w’);
 14     fwrite($fp, (($total_visits + 1) . “\n” . ($unique_visits + 1)));
 15     fclose($fp);
 16
 17     // set a cookie marking that we’ve counted this user
 18     setcookie(’counted’, 1, time()+64281600, ‘/’, ‘.christiandmike.com’, false);
 19 }else{
 20     // we want to track visits only to the frontpage
 21     if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == ‘/’){
 22         // reopen the file, overwrite the total count and close the file
 23         $fp = fopen(’counterlog.txt’, ‘w’);
 24         fwrite($fp, (($total_visits + 1) . “\n” . ($unique_visits)));
 25         fclose($fp);
 26     }
 27 }

And this chunk of code goes in footer.php:

 10  // get the current count from the counterlog and print it out
 11  $data = file('counterlog.txt');
 12  $total_visits = $data[0];
 13  $unique_visits = $data[1];
 14  ?>
 15  We have had <strong><?= $total_visits ?></strong> visits and <strong><?= $unique_visits ?></strong> unique visits[...]

counterlog.txt is a blank file that needs to be writable by the web server. And there we go, a really simple, yet useful application made possible thanks to cookies.