Online Services Access Counter How To

State of Oregon - Online Services

155 Cottage St NE Salem OR 97301

Phone: 503-378-2135 Fax: 503-378-5543

Access Counter How To

The services below are provided to users of Online Services for use in web pages on this server. Online Services does not provide consulting, development, instruction or training for any of these services, or web page development in general. Please use the documentation provided with each of these services for support. If you feel there are errors in any documentation or problems with any of these services, please contact Online Services Support.

Online Services shall in no way be responsible for any damages or losses resulting from the use of any of these services. Please refer to the Online Services User Agreement for further details on usage policy.

This document explains how to set up an access counter on your own personal web page. Please be sure to read the requirements section. The options section provides information on using and configuring your counter.

Overview

A graphical access counter is placed within an HTML page using the <img> tag. Each time the page is loaded by a browser that supports the <img> tag, the counter is incremented and displayed on the page. The count total for each counter is kept in a separate datafile in your public_html directory. Each time the count is incremented, the new total is written to the datafile.

You may create as many counters as you like (disk space permitting) and include multiple counters on a single HTML page or the same counter on multiple HTML pages.

Requirements

1. The browser must be able to display images. The access counter is placed on your web page within an <img> tag. If the browser accessing your page is text based (such as lynx) or has image auto-loading disabled, then it will not increment your counter.

2. The browser must supply the web server with certain environmental variables. Browsers that do not supply these variables will not be able to increment your counter. Fortunately, most browsers (Netscape, MS Internet Explorer) supply these variables.

3. A datafile must be created in your public_html directory for each counter you intend to use. Currently, in order to create a datafile, you must send and email request to support@dialoregon.net with the name of the datafile you would like to use. You will receive an email back from support when your datafile is ready to go.

4.Every access counter must use the following <img> tag:

<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=datafile">

where datafile is the name of your own counter datafile. Place this tag in your HTML page where you want the counter to appear. For example, if your datafile is named my_count.dat, then you would add

<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=my_count.dat">

to your HTML page. Additional counter options can be specified by appending variables and corresponding values to the <img> tag (see Option 1 below).

Options

1. There are a variety of other options you can specify to change the appearance and functionality of the access counter. Please refer to this documentation for a list of all the available options and this page for examples.

Online Services is a division of the Technology Support Center - State of Oregon