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A brief guide to countersA reader and visitor to my Lighthouse on the Web site, John Ford, asked recently for information on creating hit counters - little graphics which purport to show how many people have visited the page. His is not the first such request. Site-creators quickly start wondering just how many people are actually admiring their brainchild. And of course, feedback on site visits can help you find out what attracts visitors, and spur you to boost the public awareness of your pages. There's no great secret to hit counters. Most run using a procedure called CGI (Common Gateway Interface), run by the Web server which hosts your site. Corporate Web hosting clients usually get access to pre-written CGI-BIN (CGI binary) scripts which perform this task and others. And if you want your own counter script, Matt's Script Archive (see the links below) provides both scripts and simple instructions. When your ISP won't help
He could try one of the free services which will count hits for him, of which the most popular has been Net Digits WebCounter. It's not an ideal solution. Many such services slow down page delivery monumentally, because amateur site-builders around the world are referencing the same few overworked servers. And sometimes the service provider just decides he's had enough of the game, leaving your counter just a dead image on the page. Indeed, WebCounter some time ago shut its service off to new subscribers pending a "hardware and bandwidth upgrade". The last recourse for hobbyists is to buy your own CGI-BIN service from a US provider such as www.worldwidemart.com, which charges just $US7 a month. That will also allow you to run a variety of other CGI scripts, such as forms processing. If you want to use a wide range of CGI processes, the World-Wide Mart service looks like good value. Counters: The Horrible Truth
Trackers: The Better Alternative
The count may also give you a nasty shock. But at least you'll know you need to publicise your site better. If you're looking for serious hit-counting tools, a good starting-point is Nick's Guide to Counters. Count the laughs instead
And if you must run a real hit counter, make sure you visit your site yourself and hit the refresh button a few thousands times. There really isn't much point telling your next visitor that he's the first person this year to stumble into your little corner of the Web.
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But John Ford runs his site on the servers of Mira Networking, an excellent Web hosting specialist which, like most other ISPs, bars smaller customers from CGI-BIN access. So John can't easily run a
standard CGI-based hit counter.
But the brutal truth is that to count and analyse visitors, you don't really need or want a hit counter. You certainly don't want to tell visitors that they are "the 000026th visitor since September 1995". If that's the case, you don't need a counter; you need a flashing image announcing "This Page Is A Total Waste Of Its Creator's Time". If you're gathering a lot of hits, a hit counter still doesn't give your visitor any useful information. It just shows you like to brag.
If you really want to count hits in order to improve your site, then you probably want a private "hit tracking" service which will provide information to you for analysis. Most good ISPs offer detailed site statistics to corporate Web hosting clients. But you can use a free or low-cost tool such as Internet Count to measure raw visitor numbers. Internet Count simply asks you to register and position a tiny, invisible image on your page. Then you can go to a password-protected page to find out how many hits your pages are taking. If you've never seen any site statistics before, this sort of service can be quite useful - and that tiny image loads without much delay.
But since hit counters have become such a Web cliche, you might instead take a public laugh at the whole idea. At Federico's Counter Gallery, you'll find joke counters by the dozen - including some that tick over before your eyes, others that spin so fast you can't read them, and one that announces it's on strike.
Nick's Guide to Counters