A web counter or hit counter is a computer software program that indicates the number of visitors, or hits, a particular webpage has received. Once set up, these counters will be incremented by one every time the web page is accessed in a web browser.
The number is usually displayed as an inline digital image or in plain text or on a physical counter such as a mechanical counter. Images may be presented in a variety of fonts, or styles; the classic example is the wheels of an odometer. The counter often is accompanied by the date it was set up or last reset, otherwise it becomes impossible to estimate within what time the number of page loads counted occurred.
Some websites have been known to offer prizes to the visitor who makes the web counter roll over to a specific number. Such an event is known as a kiriban.
Read more about Web Counter: Counter Schemes
Famous quotes containing the words web and/or counter:
“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)