_______                          .__ .__   .__   .__                 
      \      \    ____   __ __ _______ |__||  |  |  |  |__|  ____    ____  
      /   |   \ _/ __ \ |  |  \\_  __ \|  ||  |  |  |  |  | /  _ \  /    \ 
     /    |    \\  ___/ |  |  / |  | \/|  ||  |__|  |__|  |(  <_> )|   |  \
     \____|__  / \___  >|____/  |__|   |__||____/|____/|__| \____/ |___|  /
    =========\/======\/=================================================\/==
  v0.01 04/JUL/2007 (C) Copyright 2007-2007 Scott D. Yelich SOME RIGHTS RESERVED
 .,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,. 



This is the "README" for the Neurillion free web page counter unique v2
http://www.neurillion.com/p/33/counters/unique/v2/README

The software is released under Creative Commons - Attribution 3.0 unported 
see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

See "LICENSE" for text, URL above for latest version.

See "INSTALL" for information on installation (and usage).

See "TODO" for ideas about what could be done in a next version.

The idea with this counter is the desire to use a small/simple
test to see what it would take to make page hits be "unique" --
and, of course, this instantly lead to the question of what exactly
does it mean to be unique?

The initial version of this counter (v1) uses an IP address and a time
period to categorize something as unique.  The default time period is
"forever" ... but this can be changed via the calling URL.  So,
basically, you can do unique visitors (based on IP) for the life of
the page/site, or you can set the period to be hourly (or whatever)
and see how many times an IP visits with at least an hour between
visits -- and then also do the total visits tothe site divided by the
time the counter has been in place to get average visitors per hour.

v2 *does* account for concurrency.  It also uses a trigger in sql.


Enjoy!

Scott