Visitor counter
You have probably seen this on other websites before: "there are currently 5 visitors online" In fact you can see the same in the left panel of this website. Lets have a look at how we can check who is currently visiting our website and display the number of visitors on our page. In this script we will use a very simple database (actually we will use just one table, so I'm not sure we can realy call this a database...) to store the visitors. In this tutorial you will learn how to read from and write to a MySQL database and how to do a record count.
Have a look at this tutorial here
Banner rotator
If you want to show different banners in a single banner space, the banner ad can not be hard-coded into the site layout, but has to be handled by a script. The script has to display one of several ads each time the page is displayed by a visitor.
Have a look at this tutorial here
Force .pdf download
Here's how you can force the download of a .pdf file, instead of letting it behave the normal way and open in the browser window. We will also track the number of downloads, so we can show a counter on the download page.
Have a look at this tutorial here