[development] historical node counters

[Jeremy Andrews]

Hello,

  I roughed out a proof-of-concept patch against the
statistics module that makes it retain historical view count
information.
    http://drupal.org/node/142668
    
  Before this patch there's just a global per-node counter
showing how many times each node has been viewed since the
node was created.  There's also a 1-day view counter that is
reset every 24 hours, offering a rough estimate of how many
times a story is viewed each day.

  With this patch the information is divided into 1 hour
increments, allowing a site admin to see how popular each node
has been in the past hour, the past few hours, the past week,
at 3 pm a week ago Tuesday, the month before last, etc.

  The patch is sufficient for collecting the data, and the
per-node counters still are displayed properly, but some time
needs to be spent building queries for the top-nodes type
page/block.  (This is reflected by TODO notes in the patch)

  If merged, the next step would be visualizing this data
using simple graphs, allowing you to plot the popularity of
one or more nodes over time.  (With these changes to the
node_counter table, such graphing could be handled by a
contrib module).

  At this point I'm gauging interest to see if 1) someone is
willing to finish the patch, crafting the necessary SQL
queries that are still missing and marked with TODO's, or 2)
if it's worth my time to continue along in this direction.
I'm also curious if people think 1 hour granularity is too
fine, and it would be better left at 24 hour granularity.
Feedback is best made in the issue rather than in response to
this email.

Cheers,
 -Jeremy