A Little Technology Shoppe LLC

Simple Counters

Last Updated: January 20, 2000

Counters, counters everywhere! It seems that the web counter is just about a ubiquitous as the web itself! Two simple counters (one text and one graphical) are presented in three sections below.

The Server Side Include for the counters
The source code for the counters
Installation instructions

The Server Side Include for the Counters

The HTML source below represents a the server side include necessary to call either the textual or graphical counter CGI.


  <!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/library/counter/c4.pl" -->    (textual)

or

  <!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/library/counter/c4g.pl" -->   (graphical)

In order for Server Side Includes to work, they must be allowed to execute. This can be done globally with the server configuration files or locally with a file named ".htaccess" (assuming typical installation of NCSA httpd applies). A ".htaccess" file overrides global server configuration for the directory in which it resides. An example of a ".htaccess" file is shown below:

  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
  AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html

The Source Code for the Counters

The textual based counter is written by Jonathan Lewis. The graphical based counter is simply a modification of the textual counter- modifications were made by Scott Pierce.

If you are unfamiliar with the CGI standard, or would like to learn more about the Common Gateway Interface, the following URL is an excellent resource:

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/

How to Install the Counters

To install the counters you will need to follow these steps:
1. Install the CGI source files including the textual counter source file, c4.pl, the graphical counter source file, c4g.pl, and the lock.pl file. You will also need to download one or more graphical digit sets which are used in conjunction with the graphical counter.
  If you are an A Little Technology Shoppe, LLC customer
  1. login to your Virtual Server.
  2. change directories to your home directory (type "cd" and hit return)
  3. type "tar -xvf /usr/local/contrib/counter.tar"
  If you are not an A Little Technology Shoppe customer (sign up!)
  1. Verify that a directory path "library/counter" exists in your "cgi-bin" area.
  2. Download the three source files into your "cgi-bin/library/counter" directory and make sure the mode is set so that they will execute (chmod +x).
2. Create a file called .htaccess in the same directory where the HTML with the server side include is to reside. The .htaccess file should look like:
```
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
      AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html
```
3. Create a file with the same "basename" as your .html file that you plan to put the counter on, but with the extension .count, rather than .html. For example, for index.html, you would create a file by the name of index.count. Put this file in the same directory as index.html. In this file put the beginning count in it (i.e. "0"). An easy way to do this step is as follows:
```
      % cat > index.count
      0
      ^D (the control-D character)
```
4. In your .html file put something like the following in the BODY section:
```
      
```
  or for a graphical counter:
```
      
```
  With graphical counters, you have the flexibility of specifying a graphical digit set to be used to display the count. Refer to the instructions at the top of the c4g.pl source file for more information.
5. Reload your web page and see if it works.

Copyright © 1996, 1997 Last Modified: 20 January 2000. A Little Technology Shoppe, LLC. All rights reserved. All brand names and product names used on these web pages are trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders.