Hmm. I guess what you could do would be to write a CGI that detects the browser, OS and IP of the client, and then uses this data to write to a statistics file/db, checking beforehand that the IP is unique.

This could probably work well for a small site, with a smallish number of hits - remember that you'd have to maintain a list of every single IP that visits your site, and check against it every single time the index got loaded. That could get very slow very fast, especially with a high-volume site.

Your other problem with using the IP to check uniqueness is that IPs aren't unique. The vast majority of the internet (from a client point of view) uses dynamically assigned IP addresses, not static ones, and hence even if the same IP visits twice, you can't guarantee that it's a unique visitor - it could be someone completely different on the same ISP.

Maybe the easiest way to do something like this would be to use one of the logging tools that's already available, and provide nightly/delayed stats for browser/OS use. Webcounters are trivial to write, if highly inaccurate, as there's no real way to count a "unique" hit.

As far as Apache stats tools go, I'd recommend something like Analog, which is a fairly powerful and customisable analysis tool.

Hope that helps a little ..

-- Foxcub
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