So you're wondering, what are all these cookies that this site is trying to set? And how does that counter work anyway? Well, wonder no more, for contained herein are all the secrets of THE COOKIE COUNTER! And, more importantly, I am making the source code freely available for anyone who wants to implement it.
      The intelligent counter cgi that I wrote for this site uses cookies to ensure that each user is only counted once per page. That's it. No hard disk snooping, no hidden profile tracking, no illicit information gathering......just accurate hit counts, nothing more. As my site uses frames, I found it useful to use this cookie counting to prevent a given user from generating multiple hits as they traverse the site. Each page can be counted individually, or lumped together into a total. My main count is incremented from the button bar frame at the bottom of the page, which is displayed for every page.
      The counter will also allow you to count hits invisibly, and display the count without incrementing. In addition, you can specify a greeting sound to be played on the first hit to a given page and only on the first hit.
      The counter is written in Perl 5, and can be installed on any server that allows server side includes. I am making it freely available, all that I ask is that if you install it on your site, let me know so that I can take a look!
File Locking added 4/29/97

The counter now has a function allowing it to lock the counter file while it is writing the new count value. This prevents data corruption if two browsers were to run the program simultaneously.

      Source files and documentation are available from the following links:

last updated 4/29/97
12023 Page Hits Since 4/22/96
Pages maintained by Nick Donaldson.
If you have any comments or find a
broken link, please let me know!
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