URL Access Counter

The counter program presently in wide use on the Web was originally written in C by Frans van Hoesel (hoesel@chem.rug.nl) of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen for his WWW Expo project. An instance of this counter, now run remotely at MSU, provides access counts for the Expo homepage presently hosted by sunsite.unc.edu at UNC, Chapel Hill. Visit Expo to see its visitor count and here for background info on Frans' Expo project. Go here for a description of the original program and a pointer to the source.

A port of the C version to PERL was accomplished by Dan Rich of Silicon Graphics (drich@corp.sig.com). You can see Dan's version at work here.

Erik Nygren (nygren@mit.edu) of MIT and NASA Ames Intelligent Mechanisms Group recently modified the SGI PERL script slightly to execute from the host's cgi-bin directory. This is the execution mode used here. Click to see Erik's version.

Local modifications include a new locking mechanism to prevent accidental reset when the referenced page is being heavily accessed. For details on the ITC implementation, contact Joseph Burch (jbb@virginia.edu), Unix Systems Group, Information Technology and Communication, at The University of Virginia.