Goals Staff

Help Desk and Frequently Asked Questions

This document will explain how to go about changing the look of your counter. For information on how to add the counter to your pages please read the previous page. There are quit a few options to the counter and its sytax is very arcane. Don't get discouraged. The first thing you should do is to get the counter operating. then go ahead and change the way it looks.

How to call the program?

Let me tell you first, do not get frustrated because it has lots of options. We'll explain each option step by step. If you keep reading, you'll see it's really simple. You can refer to the program like this:

< img src="/cgi-bin/Count?ft=9|frgb=69;139;50|tr=0|trgb=0;0;0|wxh=15;20|md=6|dd=A|st=5|sh=1|df=count.dat" align=absmiddle >

The string between ? and " is called the QUERY_STRING. Make sure there are no newlines in the img src= line and no space in the QUERY_STRING. Here:

ft=9

ft means frame thickness. If you want to wrap the counter with a ornamental frame, you define the frame thickness like this. Here 9 is the thickness of the frame in pixel. This value can be any positive number more than 1. For nice 3D effect, use a number more than 5. If you do not want a frame, just use ft=0.

frgb=69;139;50

frgb defines the color of the frame. Here 69 is the red component, 139 is the green component and 50 is the blue component of the color. The valid range of each component is >=0 and <= 255. The components must be separated by ; character. Note even if you define ft=0, these components must be present, just use 0;0;0 in that case.

tr=0

tr defines if you want transparency in the counter image. here tr=0, that is I do not want a transparent image. If you want a transparent image, define tr=1. Note that Count.cgi, does not care if your digits are transparent GIFs or not. You must tell explicitly which color you want to make transparent.

trgb=0;0;0

if tr=1, then black color of the image will get transparent. Here 0;0;0 are the red, green and blue component of the color you want to make transparent.

wxh=15;20

wxh string defines the width and height of an individual digit image. Each digit must have the same width and height. If you like to use digits not supplied with my distribution, find out the width and height of the digits and specify them here.

md=6

md defines the maximum number of digits to display. It can be >= 5 and <= 10. If your counter number is less than md, the left digits will be padded with zeros. Here md=6 means, display the counter with maximum 6 digits. If you do not want to left pad with zeros, use pad=0 instead of md=6. Note you can either use md=some_number or pad=0, in this field, you can not use both. If you use pad=0, then the digits will be displayed exactly without padding.

dd=A

dd means digit directory. A indicates, it will use my LED digits located at the directory A. The base of the directory A is defined with DigitDir at step 1.

sh=1

sh means show. If sh=0, then no digit images will be displayed, however a 1x1 transparent GIF image will be returned, which will give the illusion of nothing being displayed. Although it will seem that nothing is displayed, the counter will be incremented all right. This option is new in this release.

All these options must be in the same order as told and all in lower case and all of them must exist.