City Of Night - Doing Page Counters

Adding Counters To Your Web Pages

This page presents a simple method for adding counters to your web pages. Its advantages are:

It works with CERN httpd
It displays the counts even on text browsers (does not use .gif)
Required no C programming or compiles
Allows use of html to format/color the count (fonts, etc).
Same technique can insert other data besides a count.

Of course, it has some disadvantages:

You must be either root, or owner of the httpd process to install it.
It does not have fancy features
If you have more than a handful of pages you want to maintain counts for, then it might be less work to install some other method.

Here is the method I used:

Take the html file on which you want the count to appear, and break it into two files at the point where you want the count to appear. I named these files welcome.pt1 and welcome.pt2.

Create a script file like this:

#!/bin/bash
#
# These lines get your current count value, increment it, then
# write it back to the count file. You can setup several count
# files if you want, with separate scripts
#
C=`cat /www/cgi-bin/count`
C=$[$C+1]
echo $C > /www/cgi-bin/count
#
# These lines build your page using the pieces you saved, plus the
# count file value. More than two pieces can be used, and other
# data besides counts can be inserted (like dates, etc).
#
cat /www/welcome.pt1 > /www/w.html
echo $C >> /www/w.html
cat /www/welcome.pt2 >> /www/w.html
#
# These lines direct the browser to use the new page you just built.
#
echo "Location: http://citynight.com/w.html"
echo

Put the file in your cgi-bin directory. (If you have not yet set up a directory for exec scripts, refer to the Cern httpd documentation.) I called the file welcome.sh.

Initialize your count file: echo "1234" > count. You can use zero, or you can count lines from your httpd log to see what the count should be started at.

Make sure you have the following line in your httpd.conf file. Send a -HUP signal to httpd if you make any changes.

Exec	/		/www/cgi-bin/welcome.sh

Make sure the new files have the correct permissions. HTTPD must have read access to all the files, write access to the count file, and execute access to the script.

Give it a try.
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