Producing "Most read articles" section

[The Cricketer]

I'm thinking of producing a "Most Read Articles" facility on my website with PHP/Mysql. What's the best way to do this? just update a field in my database each time a user accesses the page?

[volatilegx]

Maybe you could create a table that's keyed by article ID and a second field is a count of the number of times an article has been read by a browser.

You would probably want to eliminate spiders from this. A handy way to do this would be to have the count incremented by an "image call", where you have an img tag on your page that actually calls a cgi script with a parameter of the article ID, and the script would then increment the counter for that article.