How to create a custom hit counter that cannot be seen on your Web page in FrontPage 2003 (825497)

SUMMARY

This article describes how to use Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 to create a custom hit counter that cannot be seen on your Web page. This article also describes how to obtain the hit counter information from your Web page. back to the top

Insert a hit counter that cannot be seen on your Web page

To insert a hit counter, use one of the following methods.

Format the hit counter as hidden

To format the hit counter as hidden, follow these steps:

1. Open the Web page in Design view. On the Insert menu, click Web Component.
2. Under Component type , click Hit Counter.
3. Under Choose a counter style, click a style from the list, and then click Finish.
4. In the Hit Counter Properties box, do one or both of the following:
   • If you want to reset the hit counter, click to select the Reset the counter to check box, and then type a value to reset the hit counter to.
   • If you want the hit counter to display a fixed number of digits, click to select the Fixed number of digits check box, and then type a value to limit the hit counter to.
5. Click the hit counter on your page to select it, and then click Font on the Format menu.
6. Under Effects, click to select the Hidden check box, and then click OK.

Create a custom image that cannot be seen on your Web page

To create a custom image that cannot be seen on your Web page, follow these steps:

1. Open the Web page in Design view. Use an image editing program to create the image that you want to use for the hit counter. The image can be a transparent image, an image that has the same color as the background of the page, or an image that has a width of 1 pixel and a height of 1 pixel. For more information about how to create a custom image, see the "References" section of this article.
2. Save the image in the Images folder of your FrontPage Web.
3. On the Insert menu, click Web Component.
4. Click Hit Counter. Under Choose a counter style, click a style from the list, and then click Finish.
5. Click Custom Picture in the Hit Counter Properties dialog box.
6. Type images/image_filename in the window, where image_filename is the file name of the image that you created in step 1.
7. Click OK, and then save the page.

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Retrieve hit counter information from the Web

To retrieve hit counter information from the Web, follow these steps:

1. In FrontPage, open your Web.
2. On the Tools menu, click Site Settings.
3. On the Advanced tab, click to select the Show hidden files and folders check box.
4. Click Apply, and then click Yes to update the Web.
5. In Folders view, double-click to open the _private folder.
6. Right-click page_name.cnt, where page_name is the name of the page where you inserted the hit counter. Point to Open With, and then click Choose Program .
7. In the Open With box, click Notepad, and then make sure that the following check boxes are not selected:
   • Associate files of this type with the selected program
   • Set as default
8. Click OK.
   
   Your hit counter statistics are displayed in Notepad.

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References

For more information about how to create a custom hit counter image, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: back to the top