Webpage Counter on AFN

Alachua Freenet provides a Webpage counter CGI for use by AFN users in their homepages.

For details on the counter we use, check out the WWW Counter homepage at:

This webpage counter document is also available as a plain text file.

If your counter is not functioning correctly (I.E. you're getting error messages for some reason), send mail to admin@afn.org detailing the error you get.

What Is A Web Counter?

A web counter is a special program called whenever someone views a homepage. It increments a counter on the webserver for that homepage, then graphically displays it in the page. While they are appealing to many, they have limited use as they do not get displayed by textual browsers.

For more information on Web pages and how to gain graphical browsing access, check out the Web Information page and the SLIP Information page.

How To Use The Counter

Insert a tag in the following format in one of your .html documents:

Do not literally use the string "your-username-here". Instead, you should enter your Alachua Freenet account name. NOT your personal name! The username you use to login. For example, if you normally login to the account the homepage is for by typing in:

at the "login: " prompt, then you would have a tag like this:

in the .html document you wanted the counter to appear in. NOTE: If you use the same tag for several different .html documents, your counter will become highly inaccurate, as each page being loaded will increment the same, single counter file.

Various Options

This new counter script supports a number of options for controlling how the counter appears and behaves, including several different digit formats, an initial count amount, and other features. You can find out about all the options and how to use them by checking out the Counter Homepage at:

The most important option you will want to use is the one to set the initial counter value. The option is "st" and can only be used once when the counter file is first created. After that, it has no effect. So if you want to carry over the count you currently have, you need to edit the .html document to insert the new counter tag with the specific starting value. For example:

will create the counter file joeuser.dat for the AFN user "joeuser" with a starting count of 1,000 hits. When the page is first brought up with this new tag, the counter will be initialized. After that point, the "st=1000" option will be ignored (and the tag can be modified to remove that option if you wish).

It's important to make sure you use the right starting value and the right data file name before inserting the tag in your homepage document! Please read the documentation mentioned above before doing this. We will not be able to individually fix people's counter values if they are set wrong.

AFN Webmaster - 8/16/97