Comments on: django-hitcount: simple app to count hits/views for an object

By: Damon

Damon — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:55:16 +0000

I opened a ticket:

http://github.com/thornomad/django-hitcount/issues/#issue/3

Comment there with input. Shouldn’t be that hard to implement … importing the list of UA’s will be the major work … if it can be called that.

By: Damon

Damon — Sun, 02 May 2010 11:29:55 +0000

That's a great idea! I would love to implement some alternative methods to recording a Hit ... if you look under the views.py you'll see I separated the base Hit processing method [_update_hit_count(request, hitcount)] from the ajax method. If you wanted to fork the project and add another view method that utilizes the UA list and doesn't require javascript, I would be happy to test it and merge it into the master branch. I think it would be useful for people who aren't already using jQuery. If you aren't up for it, I will try and add that feature when I have a chance ... contact via github if you are interested. Thanks for the idea!

By: Jared Forsyth

Jared Forsyth — Sun, 02 May 2010 03:52:56 +0000

As far as bot checking goes, it looks like you could either run the UA past all of the known bot UA strings (http://www.pgts.com.au/pgtsj/pgtsj0208d.html) or just check for the major browsers.

By: Jared Forsyth

Jared Forsyth — Sun, 02 May 2010 03:45:07 +0000

Hmmm I guess that makes sense…although for bots one step could be to check the user-agent string. It wouldn’t prevent people purposefully spamming, but then neither would the ajax method.

By: Damon

Damon — Sun, 02 May 2010 01:03:11 +0000

You could do that – however, the AJAX approach is just one way to try and counter ‘false counts’ … if it was triggered by a database hit (or page load) all the web crawlers and bots would set off hits every time the page read … which would be a lot. AJAX, hopefully, helps to ensure that only real computer users are triggering a hit.

By: Jared Forsyth

Jared Forsyth — Sat, 01 May 2010 23:43:53 +0000

Why do you include the ajax call? Wouldn’t it be much simpler to just update your db via the template tag? It seems that including a POST request is unnecessary.

By: Damon

Damon — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:53:50 +0000

Well, every time a Hit is saved the associated HitCount objects modified value is updated. So, you could get the last two like so:

>>> from hitcount.models import HitCount
>>> for hc in HitCount.objects.order_by('-modified')[:2]:
...   hc.content_object
... 


>>>

That should get you started ...

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:39:20 +0000

Hi Damon. So far so good. I’m actually fairly new to Django and had a question. I’m making a video site and am using this to keep track of video views. Lets say I wanted to display the last 2 videos that recorded a view, could I do that using your app? I’m having trouble figuring it out (this is the first website I’m actually programming, so I don’t know too much..). If you have some sort of answer to that, feel free to email me as well. Thank you!

By: Damon

Damon — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:50:57 +0000

Let me know how it works – it isn’t as full-featured as I would like, yet, but seems to get the job done so far. If you have any contributions to make would love to incorporate them.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:40:24 +0000

I haven’t tried this out yet, I’m planning on implementing it tonight. It’s exactly what I was looking for. I hope it works out wells. Cheers.