PAGE ACCESS COUNTER
We make available to web page developers a facility that can supply a counter in a page. Like all page access counters it suffers from a number of limitations. For example, many large organizations and commercial services (like America Online, etc.) use caching proxy servers which act as intermediaries between their users and the rest of the Internet. Such a server might access your page once and serve it out to its users many times. Our server and your counter would only record a single access. This also affects individual clients with a caching scheme. This kind of problem affects any scheme for counting page accesses.
The counter facility we supply is the popular kind that returns the count as an inline image (GIF format). This causes another limitation: text-only browsers and graphical browsers with inline images disabled won't access the counter since it is an image. Their accesses aren't counted. This may be counter-balanced by the people who will reload it repeatedly to watch the counter change.
If you need to know how many times your page or pages have been accessed the most accurate count available will be in our monthly server reports. Page access counters don't have much practical purpose - they waste server resources and network bandwidth and the users of the information on a page generally don't need or care to know how many times it's been accessed. Nevertheless, some people like them, there could be some useful application, so here it is.
To access the counter include a line like this in your HTML:
<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=userid.pagename" alt="Counter">
where "userid" is your web userid and "pagename" is the filename of your
page. The counter program returns an inline image that looks like
for the simple example above. To get a counter that looks more like that
provided by our old counter script, use the form:
<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?dd=B|ft=1|df=userid.pagename" alt="Counter">
which yields something like
.
Note that at this time there is a bug in the counter program that prevents the value from being incremented if the current count is zero.
This is the simplest way to use this counter. It has many more options which are described in the author's documentation.