How do I count unique visitors to my site?

Question

I am making a visitor counting system for user posts to show the most viewed posts on homepage. I have a visitor counting system now but all it registers a view at every pag

Answer 1

for finding out that user is new or old , Get user IP .

create a table for IPs and their visits timestamp .

check IF IP does not exists OR time()-saved_timestamp > 60*60*24 (for 1 day) ,edit the IP's timestamp to time() (means now) and increase your view one .

else , do nothing .

FYI : user IP is stored in $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable