Taking the Pulse of your page
Access Counters are useful scripts (usually written in PERL or C)
that allow monitoring of how many times a page has been visited. Business
often use counters to measure their exposure to potential customers through
their web pages.
The are generally two kinds of counters used on web pages: standard ("true")
counters and clock displays.
Standard Counters
Standard counters record the page access count ("hit count") in a file
and update the file. Some complex counters may require a small directory
structure of their own for the images used to display digits, security and
configuration files, etc. The counter's associated script reads the file and
adds 1 to the contents. "Smart" counters check to avoid counter
terrorism, the deliberate repeated accessing of the counter to artificially
inflate the value (and, thus, the perceived frequency of visits to the page).
Clock 'counters'
Clock counters call upon the web server machine's time-of-day clock to
determine the current time. This time is displayed in a format similar to
the counter display (usually with a stylized border and numbers). The clock
display is not subject to counter terrorism, and, in some cases may
be able to determine the browser's time zone.
Who can use counters?
The answer to this depends on your web server setup. Generally, anybody
can use a counter, so long as they can access the cgi-bin directory
on the server OR use CGI scripts in their home directory structure.
How do I use a counter?
The setup of counters is not standardized. Each of the counter resources
listed below has its own description of how to set up the counter script
on the Web server. The FortNet server already has one such counter,
www-count set up. The code you include in your HTML looks like this:
<IMG ALT="[Try a graphic browser to see the counter!]" ALIGN=BOTTOM
SRC="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=accctrpres.ctr">
The code above creates a counter that looks like this:
![[Try a graphic browser to see the counter!]](/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?ft=5|frgb=69;139;50|tr=0|trgb=0;0;0|wxh=9;13|md=6|dd=D|st=5|sh=1|df=accctrpres.ctr)
Many of the parameters for the counter are optional. We could have shortened
the line above, but would have lost control over some of the formatting.
![[Try a graphic browser to see the counter!]](/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=accctrpres.ctr)
Note that two different values are displayed above (for the counter). Each
time the counter is accessed, its value is increased, even if the counter
is accessed several times in one document!
The counter data file (accctrpres.ctr) must be unique (i.e., not
have the same name as a counter used by somebody else); it is safest to have
this file set up by the systems administration staff for your web server.
WWW Resources about Counters
- WWW Homepage Access Counter
- Digit Mania
- CronCount 2.0 BETA
- City Of Night - Doing Page Counters
- David's How-To: In-line counters
- KCounter v.1.0 - Moved without notice, let us know if you find.
- Web-Counter Home Page
- Yahoo Search Results