It’s been about 5 years since I released the first advx counter, so much has happened in my life that I had a hard time making room for the next version of the counter, but I finally got there.

There is a ton of new stuff in this release candidate, the following are just a few:

– Up to date browser and OS detection.
– Significant bug fixes and improvements throughout.
– Navigation changes include first/last/next/previous links when displaying large
volumes of stats rather than displaying all in one page.
– Search engine bot detection.
– Non JavaScript browser detection.
– Much better file locking and error reporting routines.
– Display collected URL strings encoded to stop XSS problems.
– Detailed displays are in alternating colour codes to aid readability.
– Updated country of origin library.
– Aided install. The script can check all of its required files locations and permissions and report problems.

This is a release candidate, but it is a fairly stable one as it’s been running endlessly behind htmlfixit.com for over a year.
Please try the newly upgraded demo to see what’s different. (Keep in mind that the actual statistics displayed in the demo are fake and fairly old except for a couple I added to show Firefox 3 and vista/ie8.)

Those of you with the current ADVX counter, can upgrade to the new RC just by overwriting the old files with the new. This
upgrade is of no use to people without the old ADVX counter because the upgrade doesn’t come with the configuration files
required to get it working. (you use your old ones unchanged)

The new advx counter 2.00 upgrade can be downloaded here. and the instructions are included in the zip file.

Anyone wishing to report an error or bug, please use the forum listed in the menu to the left. Assuming nobody finds any show stoppers, this release candidate will become the final 2.00 version in a week or two.

In reviewing the HTMLfixIT site content it occurred to me that we’ve done little or nothing lately to draw attention to Franki’s Statistical Hit Counter. This counter is the “jewel in the HTMLfixIT crown” in my opinion, and I’ve encouraged all of my clients to use it to analyse web traffic. It comes in two flavours: the advanced counter (which at $10 attempts to partially offset this site’s running costs) as well as a free version that we can all afford.

But seeing is believing, so please take a peek at the online demo and see what you think!

Perl Python and PHP are all Open Source programming languages and there is a ton of free software written in all of those languages available online. Enterprises have until recently stuck with Java, C++, C or C# when it came to application development, but this is a trend that is apparently starting to change. InternetNews has a story about how Enterprise is starting to notice the benefits of using the “P languages” when it comes to fast application development. As a Perl/PHP coder myself, I can’t believe it took them this long to work that out. One interesting statistic that the article lists, is that PHP has proven considerably less secure then Perl or Python when based on the number of exploits found in programs written in each. I suspect that has more to do with newbie’s preferring to learn PHP than anything else, but the PHP developers would do well to introduce something like Perl’s Taint mode.