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iCoder ®The Web Site for Web Developers¯  Click Counters - Action Counters
Ok, so you want to keep track of something eh... Well, we've got some code and a method you could use, it may not be the easiest way, but it works, and as soon as we have Shiznat out, it will be the easiest. Before you start you must be sure that you have a Perl supporting host or server. You also should know how to use Perl, not suggesting in any way that you should have a PHD in perl, but the basics of it.
Part 1 The Concept
The purpose of this in our usage was to count how many times our Insomnia Web Studio had been downloaded from our web site. We prepared our old counter that could only increment a number of how many times our home page was visited. We had to step back and convert this graphical counter to be a text counter. We did succeeded after about 20 cups of coffee and 10 cigarettes.
Part 2 The Code
The code was not to easy to make small be we did our best under stress. There are two actual scripts that each have separte purposes. The first one DOWNI.CGI is used on the presenting page or the page that has all the info about the program it's size and version etc., and how many times it has been downloaded. We made it look something like this. The first 4 lines are the actual HTML files content:
Insomnia Web Studio v3.3-TDE
This is the information about it, blah blah blah
File Size: 1.22MB (Win9x/2000/ME/XP)
Total Downlaods: 283474
The red line is the imbedded CGI script, or the file "downi.cgi". We embedded it using the IFRAME tags. You don't have to embed it if you don't want to, you could just stick all this information directly into the scirpt, but it's not gonna be nice.
The next part of this counter is the file ION.CGI. This script is linked to the part of our HTML document:
Insomnia Web Studio v3.3-TDE
The point here is when the guest clicks on the hyperlink to download the Insomni a Web Studio, it directs them to the script "ion.cgi" and this then will increment the total numbers of downloads or clicks and will provide a referral page for whatever use you have for it.
Part 3 The Pieces to the Puzzle
There are some files with names such as Alpha, Beta, Caps, ect. These files each hold a numeric value for the digit. We recommend that you put all these files in a directory in your CGI directory, such as we "should" have done, we could have put these all in /CGI-BIN/ISO and we could then use the script to output different applications such as Tech 3 Paint could be /CGI-BIN/TP and so on. Now you may have to modify some of the parts of these scripts to work for your needs. If you have experimented with these files yet and don't know what the hell your doin', no prob', we're going to release Shiznat which will make this effortless and usable by total beginners.
If you have any questions or comments on this topic please contant us: unistatic@hotmail.com |
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