Copyright & Disclaimer:
-----------------------
 Copyright (C) 1995 by Eric Kaplan.
   The following code is provided as is. You may copy it, distribute is as
 you wish. All this as long as you maintain this header which includes my
 name, this copyright & disclaimer notice.
   The author holds no responsibility for this code. You may use it as you
 wish at your on risk.
   If you like this code, send me a postcard, Email. If you found a bug,
 change the code, please drop me a note at the Email address above.

About the program:
------------------
   This code generates X bitmap according to a calculated access number for a 
 given document. I've included a small feature, If you have server side 
 includes defined, you can have the output in plain text instead of X bitmap. 
 Just use the symbolic link which is generated in the makefile by name
 of "counter_a". 

                      Eric Kaplan, balder@sunshine.cs.biu.ac.il
                      http://www.cs.biu.ac.il:8080/~balder

Installation:
-------------
   I guess if you read the file you've already unpacked the compressed tar 
 file. So basicly entering "make" will do it all, You do not need to prepare 
 anything beside the program, That was why I wrote it.
   Various things may be changed, for details see the next section. 
   Even though I added the ASCII feature, I strongly recommend against it. Not
 because it doesn't work or something like it but because I'm against server
 side includes (But thats a different story).

What can be manipulated:
------------------------
   There are three files which are created by the program, one is the log file
 which is defined in the makefile as DFILE. The other two are temporary files
 so they may reside in /tmp (they are created at that start of the program and
 removed at the end). The first is a file used as a substitute for the locking
 mechanism, which is defined in the makefile as LFILE. The second one used as
 a temporary copy of the logfile and is defined in the makefile as TFILE.
   You may also change the behavior of the program by changing three other
 definitions, one is the number of times the program will retry and lock the 
 file (in case someone else in the same time called the program) and the delay
 in seconds between the attempts (defined in the makefile as MAXCOUNT and DELAY
 accordingly). The last thing is the format of the logfile, whether it will
 record the full URL (i.e. http:// ...) or just the document name (if you want
 to disable other people using it).
   I almost forgot, There is one more define, IGNOREHOST which is a list of
 strings which specifies which host to ignore when counting. This way you 
 can "uncount" yourself when accessing the documents on your server.

So ... How to use it ?:
-----------------------
   Using it is simple, just include in your HTML document an image in the
 following format:

        <img src=/cgi-bin/counter_g?docname=URL>

   Where /cgi-bin/counter_g is the location of the program on your system, URL
 is the URL of your document.
   I picked this mechanism just because this way one may serve other machines
 as well, just by replacing the /cgi-bin/counter_g with the URL for the server.

Supported browsers:
-------------------
   It would have been simpler if all browsers supplied the referring URL, But,
 Since only NetScape does I had to do it that way.
   In the future, when all browsers will support it ... ;-)

BUGS:
-----
  Not that I know of !!!


Bug report, Comments, Compliments, PostCards, etc.:
---------------------------------------------------

Eric Kaplan
balder@sunshine.cs.biu.ac.il
http://www.cs.biu.ac.il:8080/~balder/

  or

Eric Kaplan
Haseora 3
Beit Dagan, 50200
Israel
