django - Track the number of "page views" or "hits" of an object?

Question

I am sure that someone has a pluggable app (or tutorial) out there that approximates this, but I have having trouble finding it: I want to be able to track the number of "views" a particular object has (just like a question here on stackoverflow has a "view count").

If the user isn't logged in, I wouldn't mind attempting to place a cookie (or log an IP) so they can't inadvertently run up the view count by refreshing the page; and if a user is logged in, only allow them one "view" across sessions/browsers/IP addresses. I don't think I need it any fancier than that.

I figure the best way to do this is with Middleware that is decoupled from the various models I want to track and using an F expression (of sorts) -- other questions on StackOverflow have alluded to this (1), (2), (3).

But I wonder if this code exists out in the wild already -- because I am not the savviest coder and I'm sure someone could do it better. Smile.

Have you seen it?

Answer 1

I am not sure if it's in the best taste to answer my own question but, after a bit of work, I put together an app that solves the problems in earnest: django-hitcount.

You can read about how to use it at the documentation page.

The ideas for django-hitcount came came from both of my two original answers (Teebes -and- vikingosegundo), which really got me started thinking about the whole thing.

This is my first attempt at sharing a pluggable app with the community and hope someone else finds it useful. Thanks!