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Re: lynx-dev CGI hit calculation.


From: Heather Stern
Subject: Re: lynx-dev CGI hit calculation.
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 16:25:06 -0700 (PDT)

I ate the fortune cookie first, then read what Ari Moisio said to zur:
>    Sorry for little off-topic, but about text browsers anyway 
> > Hello,
> >       could anyone have an idea of a cgi-script which would calculate the
> > hits, and enter them as a _text_ to the webpage? 
> > 
> > I got the knowledge how to make a, for example, perl script which
> > calculates times run into a file and puts the amount to the output, but
> > i dont know how to add them to the page. 

I found a well designed counter script called Digee Counter.  Its home is
        http://www.pica.army.mil/orgs/fsac/eod/examples/counter.cgi

...and in case you hadn't guessed is also a working demo of the script :)
I was very pleased at the display in lynx as plain text numbers while still
having loose images for the graphical world;  it also covers something most 
others do not, providing SSI-like behavior if you don't have SSI priveleges.  
It uses tables, but apparently its structural markup is good.

This is sincerely an advantage over the SRC="cgi-program-url.pl" style
links, where the best you can hope for is to ALT="" them so they disappear,
or ALT="some random number of" so we get a potentially amusing

        this site visited some random number of times

Unfortunately most of the free "we'll count it for you" options are of this
sort... they offer nothing for the text world.  

> [Server Side Include description good, but snipped]

SSI's are handy, but lots of sites have a policy against them.  Unfortunately
web servers are not usually too bright about which scripts they will launch
via SSI, so turning it on tends to open a big security hole.

If you don't really need up-to-the-minute hit counting, using something like
CronCount: 

        http://www.ee.pdx.edu/~maurice/CRONCOUNT/

...to read your logs and count up until yesterday will allow you to
have regularly updated static pages.  The nice thing is, these are cachable,
unlike the CGI or SSI driven ones, and they don't have the kind of CPU overhead
that either CGI or SSI does, either.  Both of these are good, and are more 
important on a heavily visited site.  It may also discourage people trying to 
bump your hit count artificially.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         address@hidden
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - address@hidden
  ' | `   Sysadmin Support and Training  |        (800) 938-4078

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