I wrote a script in PHP to track visitors to my blog. This is just a proof of concept. It generates an image using the GD graphics library that displays text showing the visitor info and saves to a database. It uses PDO to save the hits to a MySQL database. The contents of the image are unimportant, as is the storage method.

Anyway, here’s the image:

You can view the results here.

And here’s the code:

<?php
# image hit counter

ob_start();

// db config info
//…
// get visitor info from server
$ip_address = $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];
$referer = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’];
$time_of_visit = time(); // not used — call NOW() in db insert because it’s already in MYSQL TIMESTAMP format

if (trim($referer) == “”)
{
$referer = “unknown”;
}

// use database to store visitor info
try
{
$pdo = new PDO(‘mysql:host=’ . $dbhost . ‘;dbname=’ . $dbname, $dbuser, $dbpass);

// add visitor info to database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare(“INSERT INTO visitors (ip_address, time_of_visit, referer) VALUES (:ip_address, NOW(), :referer)”);
$stmt->bindParam(“:ip_address”, $ip_address);
$stmt->bindParam(“:referer”, $referer);
$stmt->execute();

// get visitor number from database
$query = $pdo->prepare(“SELECT count(*) FROM visitors”);
$query->execute();
$count = $query->fetchColumn(0);
}
catch (Exception $e)
{
echo $e->getMessage();
exit (“db error, unable to create image”);
}

// create string with visitor info
$count_string = “You are visitor # ” . $count . “\r\n”;
$ip_string = “Your IP address is: ” . $ip_address . “\r\n”;
$referer_string = “You came from : ” . $referer . “\r\n”;

$visitor_info = $count_string . $ip_string . $referer_string;

// generate and dispay image to be included for tracking purposes
$img = imagecreate(1000, 300);
$bgcolor = imagecolorallocate($img, 255, 255, 255);
$fgcolor = imagecolorallocate($img, 0, 0, 0);

$r = imagestring($img, 5, 0, 0, $visitor_info, $fgcolor);
if ($img !== false)
{
header(“Content-type: image/jpeg”);
imagejpeg($img);
}
else
{
exit (“error creating image”);
}

ob_flush();
?>

I had 2 issues.

One is with GD createimagefromtext() — how can I create multiline text images? adding newline (\n) doesn’t work.

The other is with PDO — are you serious that there is on way to output the text of a prepared statement before (or after) executing for debugging purposes. I tried $stmt->debugDumpParams() but that just crashed my server.