Using counters on your web pages
Counter facilities
Some people have asked the ITS to supply a counter facility. We are unwilling to do so for the following reasons:
- individual users can use the weekly files (see below) to see how often each page is accessed;
- the use of counters increases the amount of traffic;
- supplying a counter facility on www.dur.ac.uk would slow down delivery of pages.
More and more people around the world are using caching to reduce the number of times pages are unnecessarily transferred across the world. If a Durham user puts a counter onto one of their WWW pages, then, each time a WWW browser, say in Australia, requests the page, a program has to run to increase a count by 1 and return the value to the browser in Australia. If the page did not have this counter, then the browser may find an up-to-date copy of the page in a cache in Australia.