I added the Player's Journal Index to my site late last year, and I've been curious which are the most-read topics. So several months ago I wrote some report pages to track the topics that readers have clicked on.

First I want to explain how I built the index. I used a program called TextFilterer to search through all my Player's Journal HTML files for certain words and phrases.

I then added topic tags to the entries found by TextFilterer.

Then I added links to the Player's Journal Topic Index.

When a user clicks on a link on the Player's Journal Index page, my code makes an entry into the database before send the user to the selected Player's Journal entry. I store the date and time, the topic (aka tag), the target, which is the title of the selected entry, and the target page.

I wrote a series of reports that allow me to look at the history of tag clicks from various perspectives.

The first report shows all tag clicks for the current day and the previous day. On all the reports, I've limited the date ange to limit the amount of data that is returned.

The second report shows subtotals by topic by date, and totals for each day.

The third report shows total tag clicks rolled up by date.

The fourth report shows totals by tag. This report is the most interesting for me, because it allows me to see which are the most popular topics.

The last report shows me the totals by Player's Journal entry. This shows me which are the most frequently read entries.

By studying these reports, I hope to learn which topics most interest my readers, so that I can continue to improve the value of my Player's Journal.