Most recently was whilst looking through some web-pages of a bloke who provides a free Java Counter.

Back on about the 16 Aug I had come across uklinux.net & had signed up with them, getting 20 MB of free webspace with PHP & MySQL facilities in the process. I've been spending the last 6+ months building a database-driven version of my site. Most recently, as an example, adding 200+ Conexant/Rockwell chipsets. In fact, I've become totally bloody (and mindfully) obsessed with getting all this ready for transport across to the UKLinux servers (another couple of months to go yet), even establishing new domains with them.

Then, yesterday, at work I was given a link for finding the status of jobs we had booked & was amused to see that the counters that they had on the site were blank (probably because of my company's Firewall), and went to look at the provider of the Counter, getting interested because it was free. As I looked at his pages, making mental comparisons of his page hits with mine & all the rest (mine's bigger than yours), I realised that he must be running a database on his site & using JavaScript to move vertical strips of GIF images of numbers to provide the picture of page hits etc etc...

At this point I had my ‘Doh’ moment.

I've got a site with database facilities & the ability to track how many hits my pages get. I don't need anybody else to do it for me. I've been waiting until I transfer it all across, but I can implement that part of it now, if I want to. Doh!!!

The only concern at this stage is that, whilst these pages are on Freeserve, it draws the stats & mailing links via an IFRAME from another domain - not good policy. The stats, however, have always been drawn from another domain, so in reality there is no difference there. Even this concern will melt away when these pages are transferred to the UKLinux domain.

For those with privacy concerns...

The database is at 14 Jan (stats) - you will see that no personal info of any concern whatsoever is stored, purely numbers of pages viewed & date.

A scrap of JavaScript is used to pick up the last-modified date of the main page then another scrap of script on the stats section should report that date. Experimenting on my own computer the date showed fine, but when I looked at the pages across the net it did not. The difference, I think, is because of Frames, which were active across the net but not used locally, apart from the IFrames which allow the stats in the first place. If I'm willing to take the time (not at the moment) this can be fixed. I've just had a look through the Java Object tree (Objects, Properties & Methods hyperlinked to descriptions) - something I've constructed on my own computer, and which I keep thinking would be useful to make available, but never get the time to do.

I also needed to add the facility to show the stats on a white background (certain help pages as one example) or to silently store the stats but not report anything. This latter is useful for certain pages:

• Guest pages (eg Alan Fowler's or the WebBoy)
• “Page Moved” pages
• Mail & other pages

A couple of things have surprised me. First is that some clever sod has tried to hack or otherwise affect the server - how else can you explain a page hit on “mfc/mailto:webmaster”? I've got measures in place to prevent this (see 14 Dec) but I'm amazed that the attempt comes less than 24 hours after putting the stats in place. Second is the number of hits on “Page Moved” pages. One of these was moved almost 2 years ago & had 2 hits on it.

Finally, I'm going to put a graphical display of hits into place. This will be useful for others as well as myself, plus prove that I'm not manipulating the figures. A good days work so far, I think.

My front window is an 8 foot diameter bay-window. A monstrous size (in English terms) with a curtain rail - sorry, former curtain rail - 100 inches from the floor & 6 foot high windows. The weight of lined-curtains that shields/decorates this size of window is truly awesome, and when first bought some 15 years ago I had taken the precaution of purchasing a steel curtain rail. As I now stood dumbstruck with curtains in hand, one end of the rail bravely clinging to it's batten but the other forlornly drooping to the floor, it was clear what the rest of my week was going to be filled with.

You may have noticed that the measurements above are in feet & inches. This will seem natural to you if American, and peculiar if European or British below 30 years or so of age. I'm over 50, and it was excellent to go to America last summer and discover a land that still has Fahrenheit & gallons & feet & inches. Britain - former home of the Imperial Measure - is now half and half, as the bureaucrats (b-euro-crats) drag it kicking and screaming towards the land of the Metre, the Litre & other intellectual nonsenses. Most windows are still in feet & inches. The curtain manufacturers have therefore compromised - heights of curtains are in inches, whilst their widths are in centimetres. This meant that the sales assistant & myself had to work as a team. She - being under 30 - did not understand feet and needed a calculator to convert the widths I presented into centimetres. I, being thick, did not understand what window a set of curtains 264cm wide x 229cm drop could possibly fit. I also needed a great deal of assistance & help to understand why these ready-made curtains would cost me £299. Made-to-measure would have taken 5 weeks and approaching £1000 (the rear windows needed a matching set too).

I have an interesting life (in the sense of the Chinese insult). This was clearly the time to paint the battens, of which there are 3. Rummaging in my basement I found all that I needed, including a tin of Brilliant White gloss, but also of Mountain Ash. This latter looked in the light of the single bulb like an interesting shade of grey. When I brought everything upstairs into the living room, and the tin slipped off to the floor, and the lid came off & gloss paint spilt all over the carpet, it proved to be a disgusting shade of green. Nice name, though. For the last few years I have been storing up all my old shirts, ready for a time just like this. It took 5 of them plus half a bottle of White Spirit to remove the paint. There is now a very clean patch in the carpet (with a slight green tinge) which nicely shows up just how much the rest needs cleaning.

One of the 3 battens was loose. I removed it, and discovered behind that... I really don't need to go on, do I?

What is most peculiar is that I have had two more pages called ‘mailto:webmaster’ appear in the listing - 4 in total now in one week. I've checked & re-checked, but have no idea at all where they come from. Also a page consisting of a single space. If you discover the reason for these mysteries, do let me know; they could well be attempted hacks, who knows? I've sorted my mind out on the issue of people trying to hack the database. Anyone with a home has to arrange their mind as to it's security. This is a simple practical matter, and not a reason for emotional whoopsies, no matter what. “Do what is necessary” is the creed. Same with the Database.

At this moment of writing I still do not know why, but the server logs showed that the server was almost at full load, and my little script was responsible. Yikes (sorry Jason). The first I knew of it was the wee hours of Saturday morning when I came across the message:

Warning: Failed opening '/..(the path)../stats.php' for
inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/share/php') in Unknown on line 0

I re-uploaded the file into one of the other domains (virtually no changes to the file) and changed all the references to the new location. I knew nothing, of course, at this stage of the reason why. Jason had had surgery earlier that day (Friday) & retired to bed to nurse his wounds - without informing me of what he had done. Double yikes.

Fortunately, whilst changing the calling ‘HREF’s I'd also fixed a mistyping on every page - approx 600 of them. The original HREF was

“http://modem-help...”

“http://www.modem-help...”

At the same time during this twin-track story, the curtain-rail is finally ready to be put back into place. Large voids have been stuffed with polyfilla, drilled & battens securely fixed in place & painted. It has all taken an abominable amount of time (you can tell that I live alone) but it is done.

One tiny bit of good to come out of this is that the page date now appears on the page! Apparently JavaScript will not transfer values between IFRAMES unless they are positioned inside the same domain, and since I transferred stats.php into modem-help, Voila!

My programming has had a mind-set of one-view-at-a-time - essentially, a single person working on a single computer, which is my circumstance whilst producing it all. The past couple of weeks has given me the opportunity to swim in the reality of the Server, which of course is a very different environment. At the heart of the updating was a small piece of PHP code:

1 $q="SELECT Visit,ZID FROM stats WHERE... (the select criteria);
2 if(list($visit,$zid)=mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query($q))) {
3  $visit++;
4  $q="UPDATE stats SET Visit=$visit WHERE ZID=$zid";
5 } else {
6  $q="INSERT INTO stats VALUES (NULL,'$page',$yr,$mn,$dy,$domain,1)";
7 }
8 $r=mysql_query($q);

1 $q="SELECT ZID FROM stats WHERE... (the select criteria);
2 if(list($zid)=mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query($q))) {
3  $q="UPDATE stats SET Visit=Visit+1 WHERE ZID=$zid";
4 } else {
5  $q="INSERT INTO stats VALUES (NULL,'$page',$yr,$mn,$dy,$domain,1)";
6 }
7 $r=mysql_query($q);

3 weeks later it is done. 3 weeks. 3 WEEKS!!! I've learnt rather a lot about CSS, CSS1 & CSS2 in that time - probably more than I wanted to know - and have been spitting tin-tacks at Microsoft's inability to implement correctly any (international) standard that they do not control.

If you want to read further about CSS, try the following:

• W3C CSS2 Specification - 12 May 1998
• CSS test pages + cross-browser compatibility
• Westciv - an up-to-date CSS1/CSS2 online tutorial
• CSS Layout Techniques - lots of links
• BlueRobot Layouts - unfortunately not viewable offline
• A List Apart - also unfortunately not viewable offline

<DIV CLASS='float'>
  <DIV><IMG SRC='/old/graphics/dot0.gif' WIDTH=33 HEIGHT=141 ALT='2002/3/19' />
  </DIV><DIV><IMG SRC='/old/graphics/dot1.gif' WIDTH=33 HEIGHT=2 ALT='2002/3/19' />
  </DIV>
</DIV>

DIV.float
{
  border: 0;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  float: left;
  vertical-align: bottom;
}

The one thing that has given me most fun during this time has been changing the colour of the GIF. The original (dot0.gif above) is a single-pixel of colour #010091, 41 bytes in size. To change the colour required first finding the layout schema of GIF files - I found it here (an astonishing Russian tutorial for Delphi programmers - in English - is here, but unfortunately with a crucial missing page). The only binary editor I had available to me was debug. Once I knew the crucial 3 bytes to change (9,10 & 11), and digging 15 or 20 years back in my memory, and dot1.gif was born. Excellent.

My Bay Window now has a beautiful set of curtains. The curtain rail turned out to be no longer supported by its manufacturers. To fasten it to the wall required me to cannibalise 2 other rails in the house for their fittings, giving me 9 fasteners (I needed 7). 2 fasteners disintegrated in the process - gasp, just managed it. I prey now that they last a couple of years longer.