Greetings,
I’m having issues with getting a counter to work on my website. I’m using MS Word’s built-in webpage application and everything else is fine, except for this one thing.
Here’s the link to what I’m getting: http://www.nobbie.com/9c1ss.html
Scroll down to the bottom to see it. What am I doing wrong?
Help!
Nobbie
You left out the space, it should be and apparently orifice isn’t recognizing that as an html element.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, that sucks!!! My goodness that’s insane code, I thought Front Page did weird stuff, Word ups the ante here. I was gonna knock out the entire page real quick in html for you so you could see the difference in page weight and performance but i couldn’t even right click the photos to get their URLS!!!
Anyhoo, find the file “9c1ss.html” on you local computer, right click it and try “Open with” and choose to open the thing with Notepad. Scroll all the wayo to the bottom of the page’s markup and find this bit of ‘markup’:
[color=#00CC00]
http://counter.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=nobbie-9c1ss.dat&pad=F&ft=0&dd=B&istrip=T'>
[/color]and delete it, replace it with this:
[color=#00CC00]
[/color]
following the instructions here http://counter.dreamhost.com/ to customize it how you’d like.
You could do a similar number on the rest of the page, cutting its weight into a tenth most likely if you used standard HTML to markup the page with.
Good luck
[color=#0000CC]jason[/color]
[quote]I sometimes wonder why people use counters?
[/quote]
I don’t know, as they are fairly inaccurate and full statistics are much more useful for tracking stuff.
TONS of people asked for them, though, and our ‘counters’ were one of the first things we supported for that very reason.
Thanks Everyone for your Help,
I got it to work by right-clicking and “opening with” notepad and inserting the line with the xtra space! It all came together. I realize that Word adds a bunch of extra stuff to the HTML code, but it was the quickest way for me to get something up right away. And for a beginner, it was important to have some measure of success immediately. As I get deeper into this stuff, I’m sure I’ll fine tune and get more elaborate.
I like having a counter there so I can just take a quick look and get a general idea if a particular page has had more views. Hence the reason for putting the counter at the top of my page. (Didn’t want to waste time scrolling down!)
Anyway, Thanks again everyone for all your help.
Nobbie
I don’t know, as they are fairly inaccurate and full statistics are much more useful for tracking stuff.
[/quote]
This is true, but I wouldn’t call counters entirely useless for a couple of reasons. One, if you’ve got a half-decent counter like DH’s (that is, it counts visitors, not pageloads, which is just plain stupid), it provides a very quick way to glance at a “for fun” number (no, not statistically meaningful, but related closely enough to reality to be interesting).
Two, since DH’s stats pages don’t track unique hosts past monthly statistics, it’s a rough estimate of “visits” (not unique visitors) over the long haul.
Three, it doesn’t get reset when the stats logging gets reset (as in 2001), so you don’t have to bother with logfiles if you don’t care that much.
I personally throw a very small DH counter at the very bottom of my pages for all of the above reasons, but it’s also there if a viewer REALLY wants to know for some reason.
Oh, and in relation to the original topic, MS Word spits out some of the ugliest HTML imaginable. Not only is it hideous and bloated, but it seems to be very good at not displaying properly in anything other than an MS browser. I will give it one thing, though–if you’ve got a Spanish document, it’ll automatically insert entities for the accented characters, which is a time saver.
Re Word code: apparently some of the more egregious markup is related to preserving ‘round-trip’ functionality for Word. I recently had some success pasting some Word code into this service which strips out most of the gunk: http://www.textism.com/resources/cleanwordhtml/. Seemed to work pretty well. I also read that there’s a converter for some of the more recent releases that will allow you to export “compact HTML” or similar. Supposedly that junks the roundtrip stuff.