Since last visit for shortstat

Do you visit your shortstat several times a day? I do, and thus I got a nifty idea for improving the system for showing me the number of visits between my visits to the stats.

The idea is simple. Some IP addresses are marked as admin addresses in the configuration.php. Then if the shortstat visitor comes from one of these addresses, the index.php sends a cookie that contains the current timestamp.

Later, when a user comes with that cookie, the timestamp is retrieved from the cookie and new timestamp is put into the place — to mark the current visit. Now we know the timestamp of the previous visit and can dig hits and unique hits after that timestamp and show them in the stats display. Simple, eh?

The cookie is stored for two months and renewed every time I visit the stats page. Other visitors do not see this information. Of course, it could be made configurable whether you allow visitors to track their own visits or not.

The only bad thing — for you — is that I’ve tweaked shortstat a lot, and I’m unsure would it still be possible to include this feature as a patch without breaking the existing functionality. I have corrected a lot of small coding mistakes, such as “blah $foo[bar] blah” into correct format of “blah {$foo['bar']} blah”, and optimised the code to use common utility functions.

I haven’t heard anything from Shaun — no reply to my email or any comments in the blog — so I’m tempted to make a new release of my own. I’m not really sure should I do it or not, as I really have other things to do, but on the other hand it would be real shame not to release these improvements to the public.

In the long run the system should go through some major overhauls, as the database schema could be optimised for smaller footprint and better performance.