The COUNT Program

January, 2007


UPDATE at bottom of page - please read

Here are some facts and details about our COUNT program, which has been in use since April, 2003. 

The COUNT program is a small .cgi script.  Until recently, it could only count the .htm webpage hits on the WFFCW.  The reason is that a small line of code must be part of the webpage for the COUNT program to register a hit. 

It couldn't count hits to pictures, videos, mp3s, or links outside of this website, because the small line of code can't be embedded into the pictures, videos, mp3s, or external links.

This page has no counter.  Here's an example of the COUNT code which is part of (nearly) every page of the WFFCW

<!--#include virtual="/pagecount/count.cgi?page=(name of page)&amp;type=image&amp;style=red"-->

As you can probably imagine, it isn't possible to paste that code into our pictures or videos, as this would render those files useless.  (I tried it once, on one picture - total failure.)  And, of course, it's impossible to embed the code into webpages (links) on other websites.

Our AXS Visitor Tracking program does show the hits to pictures, videos, mp3s, and outside links, but AXS doesn't "share" those hits with the COUNT program.  The AXS program is a completely different program, and isn't written to increment hits, it's written specifically to log visitor activity on the website. 

If you have a website, I highly recommend the AXS Visitor Tracking program.  It's available for free, at XAV.com.  It will even automatically install itself on your website.  I've been using it since about 1996, and it's rock solid.  The author, Zoltan, is a really great guy.       

I've discussed this situation with the author of the COUNT program, and he's working on a small modification which will count some of the external hits, such as videos and local pictures - ie; links located on our website server. 

At this point, we haven't worked out all the code to process external links, and we're having major difficulty with hits to external websites.

If everything goes as planned, (it could be awhile - right now it's January, 2007), we'll process all our archived monthly log files since April, 2003, and process the results into the COUNT program.  The actual number of hits to the WFFCW are going to astound all of us.  I wouldn't be surprised if the real total for the WFFCW wasn't very close to 10 million hits.

Well - I was wrong about that.  See update below.


UPDATE January, 2008: I made plenty of errors during testing, but with some help, I finally found the correct way to process all our ARCHIVED LOGS.  Once we figured out how, the processing is actually pretty easy.  It's done with several DOS batch files which only find certain matches and ignore everything else.  The entire job should take less than 8 hours. 

We decided to take all the old logs, process them for hits that were not counted from April, 2003 through December, 2007. That's 56 months of archived log files - several gigabytes of logs! 

We came to the decision to make this a simpler process than we originally planned.  The results will add the missed hits to some special LINK files.  The page counters will remain just as they were.

Instead of changing all the page counters, which would take weeks - possibly months - of editing and intense script programming, we'll add some new files to the COUNT program, and leave it at that. 

Update should take place by February 1, 2008

Update complete: January 29, 2008

very special thanks to Dr. Debug, Zoltan, and Chris for the script code!

 

UPDATE January, 2009: Discovery!  The WFFCW Welcome page (index.htm) and Main Menu page (indexmenu.htm) were never counted.  I tested 3 months of logs, and concluded that the actual WFFCW grand total is about 3 to 4 million hits more than the total shown by the COUNT program.  I'm not going to bother going through all the the work of reprocessing the logs.  Currently, there are 68 months of logs to process, and I'm just too lazy to go through that again.  Last year, I thought it would take 8 hours - now I know better.