title: How to count how many people read an article
body: <p>I am programming a Blog. I am interested how to add a counter to the side to see how many people read the different articles.</p>
  
  <p>I understood that if you have a Website counter, than you would normally save the IP and the Date in the database so you only count the person once.</p>
  
  <p>But how would I make sure that a person reading a specific article is only counted once for that article?</p>
  
  <p>The database would turn very big if I would save each Visitor IP for each Article. It came now into my mind to maybe create a Session for every Visitor. Within this Session I save each ArticleID the Person read. So before I update the counter in the database, I check if it already exists in Session - if not increment counter and save in Session otherwise dont.</p>
  
  <p>Is this the right approach or is there another way to do it?</p>