What logic is best to use for counting articles read by the same person over time?

Question

I'm planning on storing the number of times an article / page has been viewed in a database. This is so that I can have a list of "most popular posts / articles" in Wordpress.

This was a good thread for similar question: How "View Count" is best implemented?

My question is: A person may view an article multiple times on the same day / week.

What is the industry best practice for counting the number of times an article is read by the same person?

And is there a way to solve multiple users being behind same IP Address?

Update

I'm not after the coding techniques for counting article / post viewes (session, cookies IP address, CGI etc).

I'm just wondering what logic is best to use for counting articles read by the same person over time?

Answer 1

For anonymous viewing, you can associate an IP address with an individual. For non-anonymous usage, you can use the credentials of a person to make sure that multiple viewings of the same page by the same credentials (i.e., individual) do not result in multiple increments to your view counts.