Question

I am creating a simple website using HTML and JavaScript in dreamweaver. On my home page, I want to show an alert (whenever my home page loads), which says that “Hello, you are visitor no. 12. Welcome to my site!”. I want this visitor number to change on every page load of home.html.

I basically want the visitor no. to be stored in a cookie and increase the no. by 1 in the cookie every time the page refreshes.

How can I create such an alert? Please help. Thanks.

Also, I want to know if I add this functionality, would it be an example of dynamic content on a web page or do you HAVE to create database connections and all in order to create dynamic content. Wouldn’t this idea of creating cookie also an example of dynamic content?

Edit-1

I want that only. How many times page was visited. I am a beginner and want it all simple. I just want to know how I can store the no. of visits in a cookie and then retrieve that value from that cookie and show it in an alert on page load. Thanks.

Answer 1

To make it really simple for you (without using the database) you can store the number in a .txt file in the server, and use a simple scripting language like PHP to send it in a hidden field to the client. Every time the PHP page runs, it will have to get the current number and increment it. Something like this:

$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$count = fgets($fh);
$count++;
fclose($fh);

$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w');
fwrite($fh, $count); // write the incremented counter
fclose($fh);

echo "<input type='hidden' id='counter' value='$count'>";

Then, you would have to get this counter value from the javascript (client side) and alert to the user.

var visitCount = document.getElementById('counter');
alert("Hello, you are visitor no. "+visitCount+". Welcome to my site!");