Graphic/Web Design Blog

I love using BBClone as a quick on the fly page counting system. BBClone is a website counter written in php and gives the user a quick summary of who is on their site and where that visitor came from.

Note:
This post will be very technical assuming the reader has a basic understanding of BBClone and the ability to edit your blog’s source code with a text editor.

For starters this is the snippet of code you will need:

<?php
define(’_BBC_PAGE_NAME’, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
define(”_BBCLONE_DIR”, “../website/bbclone/“);
define(”COUNTER”, _BBCLONE_DIR.”mark_page.php”);
if (is_readable(COUNTER)) include_once(COUNTER);
?>

There are two parts to this code that make it work with WordPress. The first is on the first line and is dark red. $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] will display this when a visitor hits a page:

This is the complete path to the page minus the root directory.

Note:
If you are familiar with BBClone those stats will make sense. For readers not familiar with BBClone this tells me I had a hit to my Changing Measurements Shortcut in InDesign blog post with referer digg.com and with a search query of indesign.

The green text on line two: ../website/bbclone/ is the path where bbclone will write to. This will be different depending what directory contains the bbclone files.

I have not been able to get it to work except when adding the code manually to the source code of each page in my blog.

What I did was opened the following pages in a php text editor: 404.php, archive.php, index.php, links.php, page.php, search.php, single.php and then looked for this code:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

I placed the snippet of code directly after the get_footer() function. When I tried to place the code in the actual footer.php file all I received was error messages, so this was the next best thing.

Good luck, leave a comment if you get stuck and I will try to help debug.

Tags: bbclone, counter, hack, php, text editor, wordpress

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 7:47 pm and is filed under php, web design, wordpress hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.