Counters
WWWCounter-2.4 has been installed on the web server to allow students and faculty to keep track of the traffic on their pages. The information in this document has been taken from http://www.muquit.com/muquit/software/Count/Count.html. For the complete documentation, visit that site.
WWWCounter-2.4 is a cgi-bin program that can be called from within an HTML IMG tag. WWWCounter-2.4 processes the arguments you give it, and then creates a .gif file which is then placed in your document. Newer functionality has been added to the latest version which allows you to rotate this graphic, or display the time or date rather than your counter.
To use the counter, refer to the program from your web page like this:
<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=sample.dat" align="absmiddle">
The string between ? and " is called the QUERY_STRING. There can be no newlines in the <img src="..."> line and no space in the QUERY_STRING. df stands for datafile and sample.dat is the counter datafile. The counter stores the number of hits in this file.
For example,
<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?dd=B|ft=1|df=count.dat">
displays the following counter
The data file must be created by an administrator for you before using the counter. Use the Support Portal to request a counter file. Be sure to include the name of the file as you would like it to appear. Do not request a file named counter.dat or count.dat. It must be personalized, like ece2.dat. After your file is created, replace the sample.dat in the img tag above with that dat filename.
If you want to use different digits, put the files in their own directory in your account. This directory needs to be readable by anyone - you can set this using the command
fs sa -dir . -acl web rl
from within the digit directory on one of the Public Unix Machines (instructions here). You can access the digits by using the counter tag
dd="users/YourClassOrGroup/YourUserName/PathToYourDigitDirectory"
where YourClassOrGroup is your graduating class (class99, class00, etc.) or your group of users (faculty, grad, etc.), YourUserName is your login name, and PathToYourDigitDirectory is the full path to the digit directory that you just created relative to your home directory. (If you are unsure of any of this information, please contact the IAIT Help Desk for assistance.) For example, if the user anakha in the class of 2001 created a digit directory in his Public directory named Digits, he would use the following tag:
dd="lusers/class01/anakha/Public/Digits"
Be sure that there is no leading or trailing '/', and remember that this runs on a Unix system, which is case sensitive. Please read the web page mentioned above for more information on using digits. (The mkstrip program mentioned on that page is installed on the Public Unix Machines.)
