Jason Silver

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

Spiffy New Counter

I wrote a new script last night, called CounterMail.

Not all web hosts allow server side includes, and many do not provide statistical information about your visitors. You'd like to know who is visiting your page, what route they're taking through your site, what browser they are using, and what time they were there? Maybe you want to know the sites which are linking to you and which links are generating the most traffic.

Now this is all possible, even with limited CGI access. If you can run basic Perl scripts, and have access to SendMail on this server, CounterMail can retrieve the information from your visitors, and email it to you. You get to choose when the email comes; every visit, after 10 visits, 50 visits, or any number of visits-- it doesn't matter.

Want to show a counter on your page? This script can be called using SSI, to show a simple count of unique visitors. A visitor won't be counted twice, even if the counter is placed on all your pages.

Call it with an img tag, and add the string /blank.gif to the end of the script to display a one pixel gif. Or, call it with a Server Side Include to show the visitor count.

This is a brand new script, so try it out and let me know what you think. I decided to try using it on ServiceBuilder.net. Cool!

~Jason