UNICOM

How to Add a Counter to Your Web Page

The instructions below will only work for a valid UNICOM domain or personal web page. It will not work for external domains or personal pages. For support on these sites, contact your Internet Service Provider.

The instructions below presume you know how to edit your web page and can FTP to your site, either via a standard FTP program or Front Page.

Please note that a home page counter is not a true indicator of how many actual visits or return visits you receive. A search engine robot, for example, will increment your counter. For the best view of where your traffic is coming from and overall visit indicators, use your domain statistics (documentation on how to access your stats to follow.)

How it Works

We are using version 2.6 of the WWW Homepage Access counter by Muhammad A Muquit, Copyright 1995-2001. Although we have the documentation located here and samples located here, should you encounter problems or want to view the latest docs you can do so on the muquit.com website. The WWW Homepage Access counter is a robust counter with many more features than displayed on the samples page.

The first time you add the web counter code to your page, your personal counter data file is created and initialized. If your counter data file name is not unique, it may very well use someone else's counter data file, producing inaccurate results. Be sure to name your .dat file something unique to your location, without spaces, special characters, or dots in the file name except the dot separating the name and ".dat." A good naming scheme might be to name your dat file after your domain. If problems are encountered, it will be easier to locate your .dat file for debugging.

The programming of the counter script reads in your dat file, gets the appropriate images, and displays the count on your page each time a new request for the page is called.

Inserting the Code

The code that calls the counter consists of the location of the counter and your data file name, both required. Additionally, there are a variety of parameters that can be added to change the look and functionality of the counter. The counter code is inserted in a standard query string format, where the question mark follows the script location and each parameter is in a key=value format, denoted by the equal sign. Each successive "pair" of parameter values are separated by an ampersand. For example:

<IMG src="http://www.uci.net/cgi-bin/Count.cgi - The location of the counter. The capital "C" IS IMPORTANT.
? - Indicates this is a query string to be parsed by the script. Anything after the question mark is a parameter.
df=unique_file_name.dat - Your unique data file name, as described above. No spaces, special characters, and the file name must end in ".dat."
& - Indicates another parameter follows. Look at this as an "And."
ft=6 - Using the frame thickness as an example, this is a second parameter applied to your version of the counter.
" alt="Counter"> - Since the counter is called by an image tag, always use an ALT tag (required under HTML 4.0 specification.) The closing carat denotes the end of the code. Also note the first quote ", which "closes" the quote opened in the beginning of the code; all quotes around values should be in pairs.

All together, the counter code looks like this:

<IMG src="http://www.uci.net/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=uniq_file_name.dat&ft=6" alt="Counter">

(The previous code is intended to all be on one line, with only one space in the entire line, between 'dat&ft=6"' and 'alt="Counter">'.)

Which in plain English, means "Display the image produced by Count.cgi, using 'unique_file_name.dat' to keep track of the hits, set the frame border to 6 pixels wide."

For more information, review the counter documentation and counter samples. Most variations of the counter can be simply copied and pasted from the sample page (be sure to add your .dat filename!) and there are many variations you can add if you browse through the documentation.

If you encounter problems, be sure to browse through the Frequently Asked Questions section of the documentation before reporting your problem to UNICOM.