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• UVM Web Team's Guide to Web Publishing
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• mySQl at UVM

In general, counter images are pretty useless, especially if you are trying to track visits to a large number of web pages. If you are running a web site for a UVM Department, Program, or official Organization, see the notes on AccessWatch.

For people with pages on University of Vermont servers, a simple graphic counter for a particular HTML page can be established with the following HTML:

< IMG SRC="http://scripts.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/nph-count?arg1=value1&arg2=value2">

where arg1,2,.... are any of these supported arguments.

• width=number

  Specifies the number of digits in the resulting image.

• link=URL of the page on which the counter is located

  The link-argument is used to keep track of a certain counter. It should be unique for each counter. A good choice is the URL of the page on which the counter image is located.

• increase=number; default 1

  Specifies the number by which the counter should be increased. This can be used to check how many times a certain page was visited without increasing the counter. In that case specify increase=0.

  Resetting a certain counter to zero is also possible by specifying a negative number here.

• show=NO

  In case you would like to keep track of the number of accesses to a certain page without showing the counter image, specify the above argument. Note: the word NO must be capitalized.

The webmaster highly recommends:

1. Use the show=NO construct on all your pages. The counter image looks like a rather ugly "odometer." Its inclusion in a page does little to enhance the visual aspect of the page layout, and gives the impression that your are more concerned with advertising just how cool you are rather than collecting statistically significant data. In addition, show=NO also helps hide the fact from the rest of planet Earth that we have a counter available for our internal use.
   
   < IMG SRC="http://scripts.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/nph-count?show=NO&link=http://www.uvm.edu/~juser/">
   

2. Create a "secret page" known only to you which displays the counts for your page or pages, but does not artificially increment the count:
   
   < IMG SRC="http://scripts.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/nph-count?increase=0&link=http://www.uvm.edu/~juser/">

For an example, see the UVM WWW Server Stats Page.

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The Result

Your counter will look something like this: . Not pretty, but functional within its limits.

Last modified April 02 2002 11:31 AM