Introduction to The Delorie Counter

The Delorie Counter is a semi-standard general purpose access counter, time string generator, and all-around string to gif converter. This particular implementation was created because there weren't any access counters out there that worked for ISPs - most of them required that the user have write access to some common, or acted through remote CGIs (i.e. anyone on the net could use them). This counter is designed to work with Apache's new "Handler" mechanism, although it can be used by ISPs with less functional servers as well.

The Delorie Counter operates in two modes:

• Access counter. Using a user-editable configuration file, gifs of access counts are generated according to the user's specifications.

• String display. Any string composed of characters in the chosen character map can be combined with a border to make a gif.

The user can configure the following options:

• A character set to map each character to. These may be fixed or proportional width.
• An optional border to add to the image.
• A client host that can reset the counters.
• A set of hosts to ignore (previous count is displayed, but count is not incremented).
• A format to print the count as.