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/* Web Stats Tracker v 2.0  		                                    */
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/* Readme.txt			                                          */
/* Copyright (c) 2004 by Martin Jamieson (webmaster@marketing-seo.com)  */
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1. A Few Words
2. Requirements
3. Installing Web Stats Tracker
4. Troubleshooting and Support
5. About Marketing-SEO.com

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1. A Few Words

This has been a big update!

Web Stats Tracker is a free script that you can use on your websites however you choose. 

In order to support further efforts in enhancing this script and developing a comprehensive web stats tool that delivers everything premium stats packages have to offer, I do have a few simple requests that I hope you can assist with.

1. While you are free to unsubscribe from our newsletter or mailing list at any time, I hope that you will discover it to be a valuable source if information on Internet Marketing and Web Stats. If you have a request for a topic you would like to see covered, let us know on our forum, or via email and we will try to include it in a future issue.

2. Visit (and post! to) our new Website Promotion Forums located at http://forum.marketing-seo.com They are only new, so not a lot of people posting at the moment, but with your help, and a bit of support, this can grow into a valuable resource and community. It is also our support site for this Web Stats Tracker script - so if you have problems, or want to suggest a new feature - then this is the place to visit. The more people we have posting here, the more support we can give to future additions of this script... so get to it! ;)

3. We try to locate advertisers that offer interesting products or services to our visitors - these offers are always changing and I guarantee that there will be some fantastic value there on occasions. Taking notice of any advertisements on our site, and following through with any that are of interest to you is the best way that you can help us continue future support for this script.

While we give this script away free (and plan to always continue doing that), our only source of income for supporting and developing this script comes from the advertising we place on our sites. If we can not get a reasonable level of support from the people who use this script, then we will have no option to either start charging for new versions, or stop development altogether. 

With your help, we can make this a fantastic free tool for webmasters - we are not asking for money from you, just your support in our newsletter, forums and following through with any advertisers on our site that offer products or services that are of interest to you.

If there is an easier way to get those 'warm and fuzzy' feelings from knowing you've done good, then I'm yet to see it - it's completely up to you, but we'd love to see you around the forums or visiting our site from time to time.

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2. Requirements

Web Stats Tracker requires PHP and MySQL to run. Any versions close to the current release should be fine.

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3. Installing Web Stats Tracker

Copy Files - Installation is pretty straight forward - copy everything provided in the zip file to
the server where your website is (including the directory structure) - You can place these files in
a sub-directory if you choose.


** If you are upgrading from an earlier version - You do not need to create a new database, instead run the upgrade script webstats/sql/upgrade.sql on the table where your existing version of webstats is located (see below for details on how to run scripts on your database). Once that has been done successfully, run the file webstats/sql/upgrade.php - this will add in some data from your existing stats. Note: You do not need to run the webstats/sql/upgrade.php file if you do not want to, all that will happen is that your keywords, tracking tags and referring domains will only be collected from now on, it will not extract existing data from any previously collected stats.**

Create Database - Create the database table by running the file webstats/sql/webstats.sql in your database 
management program (phpMyAdmin is a good one http://www.phpmyadmin.net/) (if you're placing this in
a separate database, you'll need to create that first - otherwise, it can easily be placed as a new
table in an existing database... it's only the one table, so up to you how you want to do it), if
you have command line access to MySQL you can run it through there. If you're not sure how to install this table in your MySQL database, ask your webhost or system admin to do it for you.

Example Database Setup - if using phpmyadmin.
1. Select the database (from the dropdown list on the left) where you want the table to be added.
2. Select the 'SQL' tab on the main screen.
3. In the box 'Or Location of the textfile :', press the 'Browse' button and navigate to where you have the webstats.sql file (on your local machine).
4. Press 'Go'.
5. Table should now be successfully installed in your database.

Edit Config File - edit the file /webstats/config.php - everything in there should be pretty straight forward and is explained in the file. Make sure you copy the edited file back up to your server, overwriting the default one if you copied it up earlier.

Add the following line of code to the first line of each page of your website (each page that you want to track visitors from anyway) - **remember** if any of the pages you add this to previously had an .html extension, you will need to change them to .php now that you are using some PHP code:

<? require_once("/webstats/includes/recstats.php"); ?>

** Note: if any of your web pages reside in directories other than your root directory (eg. your page when viewed in a browser is http://www.yoursite.com/somedirectory/page.php then you may need to add the virtual path of the included files in the require_once calls. Instead of the above line, add:

<? require_once("your/virtual/directory/webstats/includes/recstats.php"); ?>

and in the file webstats/includes/recstats.php, change this line: 

require_once("/webstats/config.php");
to
require_once("your/virtual/directory/webstats/config.php");

(If you're not sure what your virtual path is, it should show up in the error message when you try to view one of your pages if you're pointing it to the wrong place. If you can't work it out, you can always use "../../webstats/config.php" to navigate through directories etc).

The only thing left to do, is if you don't want people stumbling across your stats page and checking up on all your traffic - you may want to password protect the /webstats/ directory in order to avoid unauthorised access to your stats. Your webhost or system admin should be able to assist you in doing this. It's not a requirement though... it's unlikely anyone will a) purposefully look there, or b) be bothered to look there... if you're paranoid though password protecting your /webstats/ directory will keep out prying eyes (you could also just rename the /webstats/ directory to something else - just make sure you update the 'require_once' lines with the new path where appropriate.

Delete the webstats/sql/ directory.

Your Done!

That should about do it - go to http://www.yoursite.com/webstats/ and the results page should show up with no errors on the page (it might tell you that there are no stats to report, but there shouldn't be any PHP or MySQL errors).

The script you have just installed will track unique visitors to your website (based on their IP address), and a stack of other useful information every webmaster needs to know (and some they don't).

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4. Troubleshooting

Web Stats Tracker is provided as is (it's free after all!) but we do have a support forum that you can go to if you need a bit of help, or want to suggest a new report for future versions. You can find our support forums here: http://forum.marketing-seo.com/ They're quite new at the moment, may not be too many visitors, but the more that people like you post, the stronger both the support and the community for this script will become.

Depending on the type of error you get, there are a couple of things that could go wrong, the most common ones are:

a) Can't access the MySQL database - check that you have your database username, password and database name set up correctly in the /webstats/config.php file (and that the table was set up correctly and actually exists).

b) Can't find an included file - check that the files being included 
(the <? require_once("xxxsomefilexxx"); ?> lines are calling the files from the correct path. if in doubt, you can put the full virtual path of the file in there (eg. <? require_once("your/virtual/path/includes/recstats.php"); ?> ).

Apart from that, most things should be pretty much fool proof... that's not to say something else won't happen though - these things have a tendancy to make life difficult for us at times ;)

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5. About Marketing-SEO.com

http://www.marketing-seo.com is a resource for Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation. We are based in Brisbane Australia, offering a wide range of services - remotely working with companies all around the world. The free web stats tracker that you are currently installing is a little program that I wrote to easily track unique visitors and important search engine robot activity on our site and our customers sites.

A couple of other sites within the Marketing-SEO structure that you may like to visit are:

http://forum.marketing-seo.com/ - Our Website Promotion and Web Stat Tracker Support Forums.
http://directory.marketing-seo.com/ - An Internet Marketing and SEO directory site.
http://blog.marketing-seo.com/ - Martin's Marketing Blog, my views and experiences with low cost marketing methods.

This program is made freely available to you, the only thing you can't do is re-distribute it in a commercial manner... you can give it to as many people as you like, providing that all advertising, links, program comments, and the readme.txt file (the one you are reading now) is included and remains unedited and intact, and you do not receive any money from passing it on.

I probably should point out that programming is a hobby for me and not a profession, that being said, there are likely to be quite a few inefficiencies and errors in this script. With support from the community of users who have downloaded this script, a lot of those errors will hopefully be eliminated from future versions... it seems to work though, and that's the main thing - however we must stress that by using this script you agree to hold Marketing-SEO.com, Awesome Internet, and all employees blameless (and more importantly not liable) should any unforseen circumstances occur - whether that be loss of information, unavailability of website or those unfortunate occurences where your server is reduced to a sparking mound of dust.

Updates and new features are planned to be added to the Web Stat Tracker on regular occasions, please check http://www.marketing-seo.com/software-tools.php or http://forum.marketing-seo.com for information on the most current version.

If you would like to offer help with future versions of this software (no payment is available, helping webmasters with a quality free tool is the only satisfaction I can offer), please contact me at wemaster@marketing-seo.com and let me know what you can do.

Good luck, may the traffic be with you, and I hope you enjoy this program.

Martin Jamieson
Marketing-SEO.com