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Site Statistics and Counters


BCN runs Analog to analyze the web server logs and create reports on site usage. In addition, there are hit counters available. Although counters are convenient to use, they offer no information about timeliness of the hits and are difficult to reset.

Use of hit counters on BCN owned pages and centers is discouraged. Analog reports are created weekly for all centers; please contact me (Paul von Behren) for information on using analog reports.

Use of a counter will slow down the responsiveness of your web page. The demo page for vcounter styles demonstrates this - it has 8 counters and very little else. It takes about 20 seconds for this page to completely display all the counters; divide this delay by 8 to get a sense of how much time each of your users will be impacted by the use of a counter.

If you still want to use counters, here's how to set them up.

For .html or .htm pages
A graphic counter is available for HTML pages. There are numerous options described at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/bcn/vcounter/vcntrdoc.html

The documentation for vcounter describes how it can be used in .html pages (these examples have <IMG SRC... tags) and in .shtml pages (these examples have <!--#include tags). You must use the <IMG SRC... format on .html or .htm pages.

Example: <img src="/cgi-bin/vcounter?start=13&style=faketext"> The available styles are demod on this page.

For .shtml pages
Text and Graphic counters are available for .shtml pages.

  • /cgi-bin/counter is text-based, so it is easy to use and picks up the background color and the font size and style with no extra effort.

    Example:
    Page accessed <!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counter"--> times.

    The style of the counter can be either ordinal or cardinal:

    For an ordinal count: (example 1)
    <!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counterord"--> (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.)
    For a cardinal count: (example 2)
    <!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counter"--> (1, 2, 3, etc.)

  • For a graphic counter, you can use vcounter - described above.

Last Update: , by Paul von Behren
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