Vent: I had to pick between a guestbook or a hit counter for my 1998 fan site

Back when I was building my X-Files fan page, I hit a wall with my free web host. They only gave me 5 MB of space, and my page was already full of low-res GIFs and a MIDI file of the theme song. I had to choose: add a guestbook script so people could leave messages, or put a hit counter at the bottom to watch the numbers climb. I went with the guestbook, thinking community was better than stats. It worked, but man, it was a pain. The Perl script would break every few months, and I'd spend a whole weekend fixing it by hand, copying code from a Geocities help forum. The counter would have just sat there, quietly doing its job. Did anyone else face a choice like that, where the cooler feature was also the biggest headache?

2 comments

2 Comments

viola_cooper625d agoTop Commenter

Remember reading a forum post where someone used a hit counter that only went up to 99999. It rolled over to zero and they lost their mind trying to find a new script, all while their guestbook filled with people asking if the site was brand new. Your Perl script breaking sounds way more familiar.

nathan_thompson625d ago

That guestbook filling up with confused people is the best part.