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BCB Spider Tracker - Installation |
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Description |
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BCB
Spider Tracker will track hits from Search Engine Bots (aka Spiders)
and record their visits in a database for you (and your site's
human visitors) to view.
Other Features:
NOTE: This script only works on files that are parsed by php. |
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Files |
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Here's a short description of the files included in this package.
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Requirements |
• | BCB
Spider Tracker requires php and a MySQL database. That's it - pretty
standard stuff these days. Also, you should have at least a passing familiarity with working with your database as I will not go into detail regarding that aspect of this script (I strongly recommend using phpMyAdmin for database administration). |
Installation |
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Load the bcb_spider.sql
file (provided) into your database. bcb_spider.sql
will build the table structure the script requires to log the spider
visits to your site. I have included 5 records just for testing purposes, so you can see the results page even before any spiders crawl your site. Please delete these records after testing is complete. |
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| • | Edit
the file config/spider_config.php
to reflect your MySQL database setup. The items in italics
must be changed, or you will get errors. DO
NOT remove the quotation marks. Here are the lines you need to edit from a sample spider_config.php file:
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| • | FTP the entire Spider folder (including sub-folders) to your web site. Where you put it is up to you, but I suggest placing it at the root, so you can browse to it more easily when you want to check your results page, and so you won't have to hunt through all the files to change paths to this and that. | |||
Modify
your pages |
• | Insert
the following line into any php page you want tracked.
If you uploaded the Spider folder to the root of your site, insert this:
If you uploaded it somewhere else, insert this, and change mypath to reflect the path you used:
If you use a common included header for all the pages of your site, you can just insert the line in it, and it will work for all your pages that use that header (nifty, eh?). |
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View
your Results |
• | To view your results, simply browse to www.yoursite.com/Spider/spider_results.php. If you didn't install the folder Spider at the root, just modify the path to the Spider/spider_results.php file. | ||
Support
/ Contact |
• | This script is provided AS IS, and we at bluecollarbrain assume no liability for any problem you may encounter due to the use of this script. That being said, we wouldn't be opposed to giving a little help if you followed the installation instructions and can't seem to get it to work. Email any problems you encounter to bassface@bluecollarbrain.com, and we'll try to help you get it sorted out. Also, if you get it working and are liking it, let us know that, too! Email us at bassface@bluecollarbrain.com with a link to your results page. |
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Notes |
• | You may change anything about the results page you want: colors, fonts, etc. You can change/remove the .jpg, too. We would ask that you leave the link at the bottom, especially if the page is available for public view. Thanks. |
| Customizing | • | There are a few things you may want to customize about this script. Here's how to do a few of the ones that we think you'll be most interested in. |
| Adding/Deleting
Spiders to Track |
• | A
little background and what's going on, first. When a search engine's
spider (or anyone for that matter) visits your site, a little
information is given about the visiting machine (NOT personal
information). We can use php to extract pieces of that information,
and from that info we can tell if it's a spider or not. One of
these pieces is called the HTTP_USER_AGENT, which will include
the spider's name. For example, Google's™ current spider
has the HTTP_USER_AGENT Now in order for a spider to be tracked by our script, we have to tell the script what names we want to look out for. Using Google™ again as our example, we can tell the script to watch out for any HTTP_USER_AGENT that contains the word googlebot. A match on the word googlebot will trigger the script to record the time, page visited, and HTTP_USER_AGENT of the spider into your database. If a match is NOT made, then nothing happens, and your page loads like it always has. All names to be watched are kept in the file includes/spider_array.php. So, to add a new spider to track, all we have to do is tell the script to watch out for a new word. Let's say we want to look out for the new search engine spider named GeddyBot/2.0. Open up the spider_array.php file and add a line to the bottom of the list, following the format of all the other lines... $spider_array[] = "geddybot"; UpperCase/LowerCase is not important, and we don't need the entire string of text, just the unique part that we can use to identify this particular spider. That's it. To delete a spider, just delete the entire line from the spider_array.php file, and it will no longer be tracked. |
Number
of Results per Page |
• | There is a variable in the spider_results.php page that controls how many results are displayed per page. It is called $limit, and it is set to 20 by default. Just change that 20 to whatever you want, and the results page will change accordingly. |
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