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Vineyard.NET is slowly transitioning towards a more standards compliant website that separates the look and feel of the site from the content.

This is done using a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Unfortunately, support for CSS in older browsers (specifically, anything prior to a version 5.0) ranges from poor and incomplete to simply wrong and painful for both viewers and designers. Ultimately, there is no way to reliably design a CSS-based layout for older web browsers. Vineyard.NET will continue to ensure the overall functionality of its website for older browsers but the overall experience will be a little more spartan than before.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and invite you to consider upgrading your web browser. For what it's worth, we like Mozilla but just about any modern browser, including Internet Explorer, should suffice.

Web-Counter FAQ

What is a counter?
How to use VNI's counter cgi in your site
What to do with parameter errors

What is a counter?

Counter images are generated by Common Gateway Interface (cgi) scripts. The scripts generally perform 2 tasks: a file with a number representing your hit count is incremented, and an image is generated with that number for display on your page.

Such counters are inherently inaccurate. The "count" number is only going to increment when the cgi is actually executed. Since the cgi is tagged on your file as an image, if someone views your page with a browser that cannot view images (or if they simply have the images turned off) the cgi script will not be executed and consequently the hit count will not be incremented.

Frequently, web designers make use of counter routines that reside on machines at great distances away from their host machine. This slows the download of the page, and sometimes causes the counter to skip counts when the counter machine is unreachable.

You must also be careful if you call the same counter cgi from multiple locations in your web pages. It is quite easy to set calls up so that hits on different pages are counted in the same file (this is probably not what you want). For example: If you use our counter, you are expected to pass a file name to the cgi script. The script creates a file by that name and proceeds to use it as the counter file. If you use the same file name as someone else, (using the filename "counter" is a bad idea) then both your calls and the calls by the other user will be incrementing the same counter.

How to use VNI's counter cgi in your site

The counter acts as an image. In order to display the counter, insert an image tag with the URL address of the counter as the source of the image. For example:

<img src="http://www.vineyard.net/cgi-bin/counter?theme=bar&numfile=joeuser.index.html">

The counter needs to be told what number to display. You do this by giving the counter the name of a file for it to use to keep track of your count, and the name of a theme (font or style).

The theme parameter can also be set to english or ordinal, or you can also look here and choose a different theme that you wish to use. remember that whatever theme you choose must be prepended with theme= , so if you chose the theme "motion", it would be theme=motion.

You also need to replace joeuser.index.html with your_username.the_html_file_the_counter_is_on

Example: If joeuser wished to place a counter on page2.html using the theme 'ordinal', the HTML code he would place on his page would be 

<img
src="http://www.vineyard.net/cgi-bin/counter?theme=ordinal&numfile=joeuser.page2.html">
This is an example of a counter for user joeuser:

<img src="http://www.vineyard.net/cgi-bin/counter?file=joeuser.index.html&theme=katt129">

Theme Catagories

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What to do with parameter errors


A parameter error is simply a way of the counter script to tell you that you gave it an invalid theme. It will be showing in big _BOLD_ letters where the counter should be. To fix this, simply make sure that you typed a _valid_ theme.