<img src="http://www.site.com/cgi-bin/email_page_hit.cgi?page=NAMEOFPA
+GE.htm">
[download]

print "Expires: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 14:19:41 GMT\n";
print "Content-type:image/png\n\n";

open IMAGE, "PATH_TO_FILE/invisible.png" or die "ERROR $!";
binmode IMAGE;
binmode STDOUT;
my $buff;
while(read IMAGE, $buff, 1024) {
    print $buff;
}
close IMAGE;
[download]

Well, that will work fine until you get someone who chooses not to display graphics -- either because they have that setting in Opera or Mozilla, or because they're using Lynx, or because they're using a browser that 'speaks' the pages to them (because they're blind).

--t. alex
Life is short: get busy!

If you want the E-Mail to go out to you every time the page is loaded, you'd have to do some fiddling in the Apache server configuration, or use a CGI to display the page, then send you E-Mail, all in one shot.

Alternatively, you could always parse the log file every few hours and blast off a summary E-Mail if you could get away without doing a 'real time' solution.

I want an email on every page hit.

If I were you, I'd prepare myself for a popularity burst, collect info per page hit, and send the mail only as a summary, once an hour or so, and only if there are any hits. You could slow down the cycle if you want fewer mails and don't care so much about the delay.

The basic idea is that you log every hit in a dedicated log file, and set up a cron job to check the log, and mail you the summary.

Update: Oh you're on Windows, so you'll have to figure out a Windows alternative for cron.

If you don't have any control over the actual web server, then I would a an embedded 1 bit image tag in the static page, and have that img src be a link to your CGI script. The CGI script will the output the actual image (1x1 transparent gif, for example), and uses the referer to know what page it was called from and then sends the email.

Michael

thanks, I forgot to say this is on an Windows 2000 server with IIS.

#! /usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;

use CGI;
my $cgi = new CGI;
my $page = $cgi->param('page');
my %mail = ( To      => 'jones@company.com',
             From    => 'smith@company.com',
             Subject => "$page visited",
             Message => "$page was visited",
             smtp    => '111.222.333.444'
           );
&sendmail(\%mail);

##************************************************
##Do checking on the parameter for security reasons
##************************************************

print $cgi->header();
open(FILE, "/path/to/html/$page.htm");
print while(<FILE);
close(FILE);
[download]

All you get is an email for each page hit

You will find a lot more info in the log-file which is kept by the server.

This looks a lot like stupid homework with hardly any relevance to real-world situations. (O, how I hated to do such stupid homework tasks.)

That depends on what you are using to generate the page. ASP, Embperl, CGI (pure perl), or what ? You just need to create a routine with the above code wrapped in and call it from the page you want to trigger this email.

You might also want to add a handler in Apache (You're using Apache aren't you ?) but that's OT isn't it ;) ?

It will probably be an HTML page. Please advise further if possible. Thanks.

for plain html files, you just need to install a PerlFixupHandler for the files you need to trigger.

<Files ~ "\.html$">
  PerlFixupHandler MyPackage::MailMe;
</Files>
[download]

Create a package somewhere in @INC that says.

package MyPackage::MailMe;

use Apache::RequestIO;
use Apache::RequestRec;

use Apache::Const -compile => 'OK';

use Mail::Sendmail;

sub handler {
  my $r = shift;

  sendMail($r->uri);

  Apache::OK;
}

sub sendMail {
  my $page_visited = shift;

  my %mail = (
         To => 'jones@company.com',
       From => 'smith@company.com',
    Subject => "Page visited",
    Message => "$page_visited was visited",
  );
  $mail{smtp} = '111.22.333.444';

  sendmail(%mail) || die "\nProblem! $Mail::Sendmail::error\n";
}
[download]

This is untested and incomplete. Read the modperl docs to find out more.

According to [http://www.carleton.ca/~dmcfet/html/ssi.html#email|this documentation' from Carlton University, Server Side Includes have a tag to generate email. Since I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, this may be one of the ones only provided by Webstar web servers.

But if it's provided on your system, you don't have to do a thing, just provide the tag and leave all the work to the server.