Making a "most popular" list? 1

[agr1]

I have a MS Access db based ASP (VBScript) website, and I have a section for User Tips. I need to make a small list that would show a Top 5 of most clicked tips (or, I guess, an automatic FAQ of sorts). A lot of websites have similar, CNN has one for its news items etc.

I'm using DreamWeaver as my dev tool.

 

[TheCandyman]

I guess first and foremost, are you keeping track of which pages are being viewed? If so, how? We need a little info and code example of what you have done before we can help.

If not, that's your starting point. There are several free(and great) program you can use. I enjoyed using this one on a website a while back.

http://www.weppos.com/asg/en/default.asp

 

[agr1]

Hi, I guess that's also a part of my problem, how can I keep track of which pages are clicked the most... In DreamWeaver, The 'User Tips' section works in the basic "go to detail page" fashion - passing the tip ID as an url parameter, then reading it in an asp page.

 

[TheCandyman]

Install that program at the link, its just ASP and MS access database. It does show what pages are popular by day, week, month year. It has tons of other options to see the traffic, but im sure a simple query off of that DB would give you what your looking for.

 

[tyt2000]

You can do this manually using an UPDATE statement where you take the ID of a tip from the querystring and update a field in the tip's record by 1 each time the tip is clicked. Just like a counter. Then you SELECT TOP 5 and ORDER BY descending to view the top 5.

 

[agr1]

Thanks guys... it take a while before I can test these, but I'll repost here if I have any problems.

 

[agr1]

I've got one question about that ASP Stats Generator...

It says I have to install the tracking script to each page I want to track. But when the page that needs to be tracked isn't a physical "web page" (a .HTML for example), but more like a /page.asp?TipID=15 for example...would it work as it's supposed to?

 

[TheCandyman]

the tracking script is simply putting

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.MyWebsite.com/stats/stats_js.asp"></script>[/URL]

It will show the differences between these:

  page.asp?TipID=15
and 
  page.asp?TipID=14

It looks at the entire URL, not just the page it's on. Which is helpful since i do that same thing.