Tricky Counters...

Tilemachos

I'm trying to make a visit counter that through an image, or something like that, it will count visitors and then return the output. OK the problem so far looks silly.
But imagine that we 've got two different pages. The 1st one is that one that we want to count and the 2nd one is the page that checks, logs, and counts the visitors. Now if the first page is at our domain there 's no problem. But if it 's at another domain there it becomes tricky. An example of this can be found at all the sites that offer counters (for free or not). The only thing that give you is a small piece of javascript just like the following :
<SCRIPT language="Javascript">
document.write('<IMG src="http://www.domain.com/counters/counter.php
?id=some_id_of_the_counter&ref='+escape(document.URL)+'" border="0">');
</SCRIPT>

Can anyone help how (let 's say from the above script) we 're gonna get a picture that it is sent by the 2nd page that counts visitors? I didn' t find yet the way to do it. I just managed to log the visitors to a mySQL db.

Thanx in advance.

nbagley

If I understood you correctly... You are trying to get an image to display when using your JavaScript code. You have managed to use this code:

document.write("<img src='.../counter.php...' border=0>");

to access you SQL database to log someone accessing your page. Then everything is working properly as far as I can tell. If the 'src' of your image tag is a PHP, PERL/CGI or whatever language file that accesses your database, that is all that it's going to do.

The one thing that you can do to have your <img src"..."> display an image instead of nothing, is to use the GD library with PHP. You can read up on the GD library here:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php

But you have to make sure that your server has PHP compiled with the GD library in it, otherwise it will not work. I hope that helps.

Tilemachos

I installed gd but the whole thing does NOT work the way I want it to work.
If I put counter.php (the page that counts and generates the image) and the image counter.png to the same directory or domain as the page that called this page then everything works fine.
The first page has this part of code :

<SCRIPT language="Javascript">
         document.write('<IMG src="http://[I]domain[/I]counters/counter.php?id=1&
         ref='+escape(document.referrer)+'" border="0">');
</SCRIPT>

The seond one has this php code

...
...
    $image = $ref ."counter.png";

header("Content-type: image/png");
$string = $top_num;
$im     = imagecreatefrompng($image);
$orange = imagecolorallocate($im, 220, 210, 60);
$px     = (imagesx($im) - 7.5 * strlen($string)) / 2;
imagestring($im, 3, $px, 9, $string, $orange);
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);

Not only this is not working when on different directories but $id and $ref are null when I try to manually load counter.php I[/I] removing header command of course

Any help????

nbagley

What is the $ref for in this line?

$image = $ref ."counter.png";

You can call just "counter.png" to get the file since it is in the same directory... I don't know why your variables are null when you call the file manually... I will see if I can find out some other thing that can help you; just give me some time. Let me know if you figure out something in the meantime.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Tilemachos

...but $id and $ref are null when I try to manually load counter.php

That's probably because you should be using $GET['id'] and $GET['ref'] instead of $id and $ref.

Tilemachos

Weedpacket is right. Until now I just loaded query string vars or submitted vars without using $_Get. Thanx 😉
At this line

$image = $ref ."counter.png";

var $ref is just forgotten there 😉
After all these experiments I forgot it there.
The part that creates the image was taken from the PHP Manual

nbagley

So you got it working now?

Tilemachos

Are you kidding me? If I did it would be on the morning papers 😃

Tilemachos

I did it???? :mad: Or to be more specific someone else did it for me 😃 .
Check this out:
http://www.phpee.com/

nbagley

Congradulations! 😃 Sorry I didn't reply about it... I have had no time as of late to work on it... but at least you now have something to work with ...and it works!