Hit Counter

Hit Counters are great - they show you how many people have visited your website.  But these can be very maddening if you don't know how they work.  Here we show you how to publish the initial Hit Counter and how to fix and/or reset it when it breaks.

With FrontPage, the hit counter is comprised of three parts:

1. the web page with the counter displayed
2. the cnt file, always in the _private folder at the root of your web - which stores and updates the count
3. a small exe file in your _vti_bin folder, called "fpcount.exe" that is used to increment the count.

Counter file example

If you insert a hit counter in the main page on your root folder, in the file "Index.htm", the counter file will be automatically created in:

        _Private\index.htm.cnt

When you add a hit counter in FP, the symbol is added to your website and another file (the actual hit counter itself) is created under the _private folder, and is named "your_page.htm.cnt" - after your page that you inserted the hit counter into. For example, if you inserted a hit counter into your homepage, index.htm - then the file created under _private will be:

index.htm.cnt

There is a small exe file in your _vti_bin folder, called "fpcount.exe" that is used to increment the count.

The cnt file is a simple text file that contains the starting count. For example, if you inserted a hit counter and instead of the usual begin number of zero, select 300 - the contents of the index.htm.cnt file will be one line of text as follows :

FPCountFile 00000000300

The HTML code in the web page containing the hit counter, again using index.htm as the example - is:

<p align="center"><!--webbot bot="HitCounter" u-custom
i-digits="5" i-image="0" PREVIEW="&lt;strong&gt;[Hit Counter]&lt;/strong&gt;"
i-resetvalue="300" startspan -->
<img src="_vti_bin/fpcount.exe/D:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Ken/My%20Documents/My%20Webs/Infocellar/?Page=index.htm|Image=0|Digits=5" alt="Hit 
Counter"><!--webbot bot="HitCounter" endspan -->
</p>

Publishing the Hit Counter

The first time you insert a hit counter, both the HTML page and the cnt file are published. However, later, if you make a change to the start count - your index.htm will be published but not the cnt file !! The .cnt files usually marked as do not publish. To publish it and reset your Hit count:

Method 1

edit your hit counter, and set it to whatever count you want
save the page
goto _Private\index.htm.cnt, right-click on it, select Properties/Workgroup
uncheck the box that says "Exclude this . . . . "
publish your web
goto _Private\index.htm.cnt, right-click on it, select Properties/Workgroup
re-check the box that says "Exclude this . . . . "

Method 2

remove the cnt file
Run Tools Recalculate Hyperlinks
edit the Hit Counter and save the page
publish.