Project 33

Multi Image Web Page Hit Counter

The Neurillion Free Web Page Hit Counters are free items from Neurillion released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. These counters were written by the author for the author to test various methods of recording and displaying a page hit counter and come with absolutely no guarantee or warranty. Please refer to the FAQ and help sections for more information and a proper disclaimer.

Multi Image

The multi image counter is a step up from the "Bug" counter, but it's also a step over as it has a little quirk. It requires a little more work on the HTML side as well as the on the server side, but that allows it to be more flexible. Unlike the "Bug" counter, however, this counter has the ability to display the count and does so using individual images to represent the individual counter digits as specified in the HTML <img> call -- so fancy graphics can be used for the counter.

The quirk is that due to the multiple calls to the server to read the count value, this value can't change in the middle of mutiple calls to read the digits of the total. A non-foolproof but simple mechanism is used to combat this. See the documentation that is part of the source code for details. However, a side-effect of this mechanism is that multiple page loads may see the same page hit counter value. This is not a bug -- the hit count value was accurate at some point in time shortly before the page load -- but this is probably different from expectations that the count is accurate for that specific page load hit value. This behaviour would only be seen for pages that constantly get multiple hits per second, otherwise, the counter will appear to be updating as expected. Also, if a system accessing a web page sends the requests for the counter digits out of order -- this could lead to an incorrect display (although no systems are known as of this writing that send requests out of order -- there's nothing to say that this couldn't happen.)

Example usage (in HTML):

For a 8 digit counter, there would be 8 separate image calls, the first would have options "?1,8" and the second would be "?2,8" etc. Hits are recorded during the call to a "?1,x" call. As you can see, options are separated by commas and the counter will use a compiled in default image path if one isn't specified.

Here is an 8 digit "multi image" counter for this page: