Need dirt simple hit counter.

I know this is a topic that is beat to death but I can’t seem to find anything that is basic enough that I can understand how it works (so I can make the necessary changes or adjustments.) I need to make a quick and dirty hit counter. All I want to do is write to a txt file every time the page is loaded. In other words I would have a txt file on the server named “visitors.txt” with one line of text on the page “&visit=1” and I would have a dynamic text box in the flash page (swf) named “visit”. When ever anyone loads the page I need the “swf” page to write to the file “visitors.txt”. Specifically I need it to take the value of “visit” and add “1” to it and return the results to the text box on the flash (swf) page, and I need the value of “visit” to be changed to the new value so that every time the page is loaded the value displayed in the dynamic text box “visit” is 1 greater than the last time the page was loaded.

The problem I am having is that everything I can find on this has so many extra bells and whistles that I lack the expertise to edit it. What I need is something that does just this one thing in as few lines of code as possible.

I have been looking at the fopen approach and it looks promising but again everything I can find so far goes a lot further than I need and at present I lack the expertise to work with it.

I am just learning the php side of this and my approach is to start with the simplest possible code I can get and then from there I can expand on it as needed.


NOTE; I am using Flash MX and really am not familiar with version 4 or 3 actionscript. In other words it may as well be Greek ( I only point this out because I have found a lot of actionscript that is from earlier versions and I don’t understand it because it uses forms / methods / etc. that are not found in any of the material on Flash MX

There is an extremly simple perl hit counter HERE you can use the loadVariables to get the count from the .dat file and remove the print commands at the end. Hope this helps.