Page Counters?

[davej]

I looked up a local "Advanced HTML" course offering and the description was: "Use of tables; creation and use of frames; construction of forms; imagemaps; working with external media (sound and animation): incorporating counters, guestbooks, and search engines; use of "meta information" tags; and a discussion of HTML editors and converters will be presented." Now of the above, I've never implemented a page counter or a guest book. So what is the standard approach for an HTML page? A Perl script? Thanks.

[niche]

I think the big issue is sql or no sql. You could just use php files to keep track of values if you'd like.

Edited June 11, 2012 by niche

[davej]

I think the big issue is sql or no sql. You could just use php files to keep track of values if you'd like.

So the HTML page calls a PHP script? I've never done that. Looking around the web I see these page counters are essentially "mystery code" that people add to their webpages with no understanding of how they work.

[thescientist]

The PHP page could do it itself, or you could have Javascript on the page update the counter. Either way, you need some persistant form of storage, either a file, or a DB. That requires a server-side language, regardless.

[getty]

The simplest form you can make is by having a text file where you can store the numbers of visitors and increment the number every time a new visitor arrives at your index page. This can be enhanced into the same form but with SQL to store the numbers of the visitors.

[Ingolme]

Hmm, that course doesn't sound too good. In their course description they have "usage of tables" and "creation and use of frames" as the first things on their list. HTML "converters" doesn't sound good to me either. Guestbooks, counters and other things like that have nothing to do with HTML at all.

[Guest So Called]

A page view counter would be easy to implement in PHP. The accumulated total could be kept in a flat text file. I did that a dozen years ago before I became fluent in MySQL.

[Guest So Called]

I looked up a local "Advanced HTML" course offering and the description was: "Use of tables; creation and use of frames; construction of forms; imagemaps; working with external media (sound and animation): incorporating counters, guestbooks, and search engines; use of "meta information" tags; and a discussion of HTML editors and converters will be presented."

Giving that more thought, the course doesn't sound like "advanced HTML" to me. It sounds more to me like giving somebody an advanced illusion that they know something about HTML and web page design while in fact teaching them only cursory notions of tidbits to plug in to web pages.

[davej]

[...]Guestbooks, counters and other things like that have nothing to do with HTML at all.

Yeah, it sounds like a class to teach you to take a plain HTML page and add lots of gadgets to it.