Spent 6 hours trying to get a Guestbook counter working on my old Angelfire site

I was rebuilding a 1997 tribute page for a local band from Portland and wanted that authentic hit counter. The CGI script from some random free host kept breaking because my server permissions were set wrong. Took me until 2 AM to realize I just needed to chmod the counter file to 666. Has anyone else fought with those old counter scripts longer than they should have?

2 comments

2 Comments

rivera.susan4d ago

I read somewhere that those old hit counters were basically just a text file that counted up each time someone loaded the page, so the server permissions always had to be wide open for it to work. Sounds like your 666 fix was the classic solution, I remember fighting with the same thing on a GeoCities site back in the day. Those CGI scripts were finicky and the error messages never actually told you what was wrong, just "Internal Server Error" every single time.

betty_shah2d ago

Oh man, I remember trying to get a hit counter working on my first Angelfire site back in 1999 and it took me three days to figure out the permissions thing. I kept setting it to 755 and wondering why it wouldn't write to the file, then I finally found a forum post from some guy who said "just chmod it to 666 and pray" so I did and it worked instantly. The worst part was that stupid "Internal Server Error" message that never gave you a clue what was broken, it was always just a guessing game. I once spent an hour debugging a counter only to realize I had a typo in the file path because I wrote "contador.txt" instead of "counter.txt" - the silent killer back then was always some dumb little mistake like that.