From: Nospam <news-1@...>
Date: 2003-05-10T03:41:16+09:00
Subject: Re: SemiOT: HTML/CGI question

Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> But I can't see any equivalent technique for simple
> text.

The only way to do this is to make sure that all pages load through a 
certain Ruby script (using e-ruby or something similar). You can do this 
in several ways. You can use one simple script that does the counting 
and then reads a page from local disk (based on a parameter) and sends 
it to the browser. Or you can rename all .html to .rhtml and add the 
code (a simple call to your counter object) at the top of every single 
page.

Most statistics scripts just use Apache's log files to generate the 
statistics (once every day). Or use an image counter (which isn't as 
reliable).

You could use JavaScript to load the counter image dynamically (but not 
really showing it). But then again, there are more browsers capable of 
loading an image (which can be as small as 1x1 pixels) then there are 
browsers capable of running JavaScript. And a text browser like Lynx 
can't do either.

Regards,

Peter