No idea if this has been sugested before but.

In your journal every time you refresh the page it acounts that as a view, since its my own profile im viewing it kinda defeats the purpose of displaying how many views the journal had. Kinda like hit counters that cound yourself.

My idea is when the user logges in, grab the ip address from REMOTE_ADDR, register it as a session variable, then when the journal is viewd, first check that the journal being viewed matches the $_SESSION['username'] and if so check the ip address from the session

This way you can maybe stop it from counting yourself from being counted.