Topic awaiting preservation: Tracking visiters through a site

I've recently become interested in the process used to track a vistor as they view the various pages on a site. For example, when you go to a site and you are asked to login so that you can see certain pages, how does the server keep track of the user as they move from page to page? How does the server know that a user hasn't logged in if they have bookmarked a page deep inside the site and return to that page several days later? What causes the login to time out?

What are the different ways of tracking users as they travel through a site and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?




-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

Um sessions.

The way you implement these depend on what you have access to, but basically it's all done with cookies (or passed session id's but that's much more difficult to implement ) and session tracking on the backend.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

I have complete acces to the web site. Is there someplace to read a detailed description of how this works?

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

there are actually two ways to do user tracking - one is sessions, as bitdamaged mention. You'll need some kind of server side scripting for that. PHP, or Perl, or JSP, or ASP, something the like.

The other way is to get the complete log files, and find a software than can extract the information you want from it.
This is less accurate (as people sharing a proxy and using the same browser and accessing at the same time will probably only show up as one person) but can be done in hindsight, and doesn't slow your server down [well, not any more than it's slowed down by the logs anyhow].
I'm afraid I know that such software exists, but names are slipping my mind right now.