I’ve been toying with the idea for a while to dust off my amateur developer gloves and make an application of my own. I started working on it last night and got the information storage in place. Tonight I got the basic part of the display to the user done. I think I worked on the display portion because I’m procrastinating getting into the logic behind separating the data out and doing something intelligent with it. I’m still working through in my head what exactly I want to do with the data and display it. As usual for me this will probably be decided while I’m writing the source. The worst part about all of this is that I know I’m doing the base coding wrong. I’m working with PHP and while I understand the premise behind classes, the execution of it for me is hard to execute.
Why a tracker? Because I knew that since this blog has some visits from real people (like you) and from bots (like Google) that I could get a good selection of data stored away fairly quickly. I needed something more than dez-created data. The process is slow-going for me though, my testing nature keeps me updating and checking progress and look a lot.
My goal: Create a visit tracker that will parse the visit data and allow for user defined categorization and view of visitor information.
Promise to myself: Create everything from scratch. No looking at source code from other trackers already in the wild. Recreate the wheel so that I know how to.
Hoped For Knowledge Gains: better PHP scripting, better CSS understanding, how to build a logic engine, javascript knowledge gains, start using AJAX instead of admiring it.
