Tiny logging
- Use it
- Discussion

Tiny logging

Once a year I have to make some stats on activity per user, types of action, and the pages/namespaces that are hot.

For this I include a short php snippet in the footer of the template.

It will write the following details to a logfile.

date
year
month
day
user (if logged in)
namespace:page
type of action

Its fast and easy to read this file into e.g. Excel and analyse it for example with Pivot tables.

I use jpgraph to make images on the fly.

Use it

Create file in the template directory, called log.txt and make it writeable
Include code below in the footer of your template

$filename =dirname(__FILE__).'/log.txt';
$timestamp = date("Y:m:d:H:i:s");
$user = $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'];
$id=addslashes($_GET["id"]);
$id.=addslashes($_POST["id"]);
$action=addslashes($_POST["do"]);
$action.=addslashes($_GET["do"]);
$logentry=date("Y")."|".date("m")."|".date("d")."|".$timestamp."|".$user."|".$action."|".$id."\r\n";
if (!$handle = fopen($filename, 'a')) {exit;}
if (fwrite($handle, $logentry) === FALSE) {exit; }
fclose($handle);

Discussion

As said, this is a quick and dirty way to collect rudimentary statistics.