The Counters/Admin Page
I have now used PHP to provide an interactive page I can use, as owner, to manage aspects of my site.
Its actual location is, of course, a secret, and I'm afraid you can't access it - for fairly obvious reasons - though
there is a non-interactive version at http://www.picindex.info/counters/! Here is a
picture of the page, though, so I can explain what it does:
The left panel displays some page counters I have set up for various pages on a number of my sites. These are implemented
in PHP, and I can increment, decrement, or reset to zero each counter using the buttons to the right of the
individual counts.
The right-hand panel allows me to set the auto-refresh time of this page, and also tells me the status of various cookies
which might be on my machine, and the state of my RISC user flag for this session. I can also set or unset all these at
will using the corresponding buttons.
This allows me to set a particular combination for testing. For example, if I want to test what is seen by a PC user
visiting my site for the first time, I unset the 'RISC user' cookie on my machine and unset the 'visited' cookie.
I then enter the site using the 'Enter site' link. Had I done so using the 'Index page' link, you will see from the notes
alongside the links that the 'RISC user' cookie would have been reset by my RISC OS browser, so the 'Enter site' link
avoids this.
What should happen is that, because the user is not recognised as an approved RISC OS user nor as having visited before,
the user sees a reference to the PC page above the normal content.
This sets the 'visited' cookie, so when that user returns they go now to the main page. I can check that this works by
setting the cookie from this control panel and repeating the visit via the 'Enter' link. In fact, during this session
I won't have to set the cookie manually, as the panel will tell me it has now been set by the previous visit.
I've also added a global reset button that e-mails me a list of the counts before resetting them.
Last modified: 27 February 2007