Counters

What are Counters?

I'm sure you've seen them in your travels - the little odometer looking things that tell you which visitor you are to the page. There are many different ways to display the information but they all serve the same purpose - count how many times the page has been requested.

If your running a site for a business you would understand how frantic the advertising people get to find out how many times the "advertisement" has been seen. Think about how the television shows go crazy during "rating" periods. They try every trick in the book to get people to watch a particular show to raise it's ratings. This drives how much the show's owners can charge advertisers for time during each episode. Plus, it keeps everybody on the show secure as long as the ratings are high.

That's kind of what counters are - they're a version of a rating system. You might get some "hit" counts from the site that stores your pages and passes them around to be viewed. Usually these count all the requests for each page and some count every file including the images. You would probably like to see a breakdown, by page, to see which ones attracted the most attention. After all, you wouldn't want to spend all your time maintaining a page that nobody looks at! The only way to get this information from your provider is to pay for it! They would have to spend some resources to provide it so this is only fair.

But what is it!?!? Oh, I got so carried away I almost forgot - it's a file somewhere with a unique file name. It probably has only one field in it and that's the current count. Each time your page is accessed it triggers a process on the computer where the counter is stored. The process reads your special file, adds one to the number, saves the new number in the file and formats a display with the value and sends it back to you. Technically, you treat the counters like images and you're simply asking the counting computer to send you an image. Clear as mud? Good, let's keep going.

Plain Counter

This is the kind of counter I first started using. I saw one on a site during my surfing and thought it looked neat. There was a link to the site doing the counting and the rest is history. I'd tell you the site but I simply can't remember. It got to be very popular, millions of people were counting and the computers couldn't keep up. It made my pages not load because the pages kept waiting for the counter to come back. I finally gave up and took all the references out.

But things have changed. My ISP (RadixNet) added a service for us personal web page sites that gave us a simple counter hosted on their computer. Nothing fancy, one counter (with lots of options) - but it is hosted with our web pages which means if you can see my page the counter works, also. I know that GeoCities offers their homesteaders a counter service as well.

That's the best bet, if you can get a counter on the same computer as your pages. Since it's for personal use, it's probably going to be limited and not offer all the frills that a commercial site would get.

If you'd like to have more counters or you can't get one from your provider then take look at Web Counters and Trackers built by Mark Welch. He did a bang up job putting together a very comprehensive list of places that provide coutner service.

Basically, you'll register for a free account, get an account number and a password so you can maintain your counter, then put some html code on your page to make the counter work. Each service will have unique capabilities so I can't really describe them in any detail here. You will be able to select the style of display, some colors, maybe a starting number, even display a date and the time if you want. You can even tell it to count but not display (for those of you who are sneaky and don't want others to know how many times your page has been seen!)

I looked at a few of the counter offerings but I got distracted by the tracking services and that's what I ended up putting on a couple of my pages.

Trackers

Now this is the neatest thing I've seen for personal use in a long time. I've seen statistics for commercial sites but I was really surprised that I could get the same information on a limited basis, for my site. At least one page of my site.

The first one I set up does basic counts but shows information by days of the week and other statistics. It's accessed through a logo that sits on the page you want tracked. When you want to view your numbers you simply click on the link with your account number and password embedded in it. It brings up the information for you (or others if you've set it up that way). You can check Internet Count out and grab a counter for yourself.

The second one I put on my site is at WebTracker. This is an even fancier version than the first. It shows you what browser was used, what operating system was being used, how many viewers were repeat viewers and other neat things. I really like it.

The Rusk Family . . . "the Legend Continues"