Visitor.exe .05 - A .CGI program for the masses...:) I ask absolutely nothing for this program except that if you find the time, to come by my site and check it out (it's listed below). I. Intro II. Known Conflicts III. Setup IV. Problems? V. Future Updates ------------------------ I. Intro -------- Ok, You've got you're pretty home page all set up and ready to go but you've seen those cool little counters on other people's homepages and wanted to put one on your's too. Well, I wrote one that simply reads a number from a text file, creates an odometer image of it, adds one to it, and write it back to the file (visitor.exe) and one that doesn't increment the file, just displays the number (noadd.exe). Here is a step-by-step guide to setting it up for your server. II. Known Conflicts/Restrictions --------------------------------- I should get this out of the way right now. Since this is being distributed with OmniHTTPd this shouldn't be a problem but this program ("visitor.exe") is compiled to run under DOS/95/(NT probably) only. If you would be interested in the source code. Just drop me an email. I have compiled the code on Unix as well with no/minimal changes. OmniHTTPd, as of Alpha 7, runs cgi's out of there directory. So if you just reference it as , it will create a default count.txt in the CGI-BIN subdirectory. You can pass the file a complete pathname to access files in other directories. This also eliminates the need for the count file to be named "count.txt" in order to run successfully. III. Setup ----------- Here's a quick and dirty setup guide to running visitor.exe on your web server. A. Copy the "visitor.exe" and "noadd.exe" to the CGI-BIN subdirectory of your httpd directory. B. Make sure that in the OmniHTTPd Administration program, under "Standard CGI", there is an entry for "/CGI-BIN" as the virtual and "C:\HTTPD\CGI-BIN" for actual (or whatever you specified the directory to be). C. Reference it in your page like this: or "filename.txt" can be whatever you want, including full pathname with directories with "/" slashes (i.e. "/httpd/htdocs/joe/count.txt") D. Now go test it out! IV. Problems? Suggestions? -------------------------- Now since you didn't pay for this, I don't have a toll-free technical support line to help you (Not that Microsoft has one mind you) but I will try to help you out if I can. Keep in mind that I am a student as well and as much as I would like computer time to come first, it can't always. Also, any suggestions are welcome. My current email is "reflux@u.washington.edu" and my server is at "http://reflux.mcm.housing.washington.edu". V. Future Updates ----------------- I will dedicate a page on my server for a while to it. Check them for updates. Pages: http://reflux.mcm.housing.washington.edu/visitor This will be up till summer. http://weber.u.washington.edu/~reflux/visitor This will be up as long as I go to the University of Washington. Things added: Ver .05 * I think I fixed the problem of multiple versions crashing if more than one copy tries to access the file at the same time. Ver .04 * Fixed a floating point bug. * Added the "noadd.exe" program. It just echos the amount of users but doesn't add to the file. Used exactly the same as the visitor.exe Ver .03 * Notcied that I used an int to store the number so when you get to 32768 visitors, it resets you to -32768 so I made it a float and now you can have 10^38 visitors...:) It only takes another 2 bytes of memory so I figured it was worth it. Ver .02 * Optional file specification * Automatic creation of the count file if non-existent with 1 in it DISCLAIMER ---------- Now I know that this part sucks but I have to do it. Garrick and I are in no way responsible for what happens from the use of this program. I wrote it myself and use it on my server so there are no viruses in it and it will not intentionally harm your system but in using it, you accept the risk that something MIGHT happen and agree not to hold anyone but yourself responsible. Whew...I hate that crap. I hope you have fun with the program and let me know if you're using it!