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Article 4 - Using a Cookie to Override Your Web Hit Counter
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What's a Browser Cookie and How Do I Get One? :
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It's just a little bit of data that a web site can store on
a visitor's machine. Just think about that though, how
powerful that is. You can, with the permission of a visitor
to your site and a little bit of programming on your server
create data which is stored on the computer your visitor
has used to go to your site. The potential there is very
exciting because it now allows you to anonymously
identify your visitors.
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Why do I say "anonymously" identify visitors? Because there
is really no way to know who they are. When we get into
logging site hits in a future article we'll see various
things you can know about a visitor; including
what browser they're using, operating system, even the
time setting on their computer. But you can never know
such things as who they are, where they live, or their
email address. Unless of course you ask them and they
choose to tell you.
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Anyhow, if you've implemented the count script on all the
pages of your site it'll be easy to set up the cookie we
need. You're halfway there now.
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So How's It Gonna Work? :
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We'll add code to the counting script which checks for a
cookie and if it's found, then we won't log that
visitor. Why? Because that visitor will be you.
Huh??
There are two operations we need to be able to do for this
to work. We have to be able to create (write) and also
read a cookie. The count program will just read the cookie,
we'll need a separate little program to write the cookie.
Since we only want the cookie to reside on our own machine,
we'll restrict the permissions after running it.
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The modular approach :
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If you've been following along in the articles you've decided
to either implement your count program using an HTML image
tag or SSI. These are two different programs because of the
different techniques required. To read our cookie we can just
add a similar line of code to either program and we'll be
done.... after setting the cookie of course.
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