PHP Web Site Counter?

Greetings from Pennsylvania. I am trying to add a counter to a web page
but it is not cooperating!
Directions are: place the count.php file and the hitcount.txt file on the server in the
same directory as the web page. hitcount.txt file should contain a value like zero.
For the include in the web page I use:

<div class="footnote">
<?php include‘count.php’; ?>
</div>

Things I have tried: change permissions on both files to 777. Change the web site
file extension to stml from html. The error logger on the server shows no new errors.
I ran a install.php to install a forum on the server last week so I know php files
will run in my server space. Could someone with knowledge of php please look at this code?

$filename = "hitcount.txt"; // This is at root of the file using this script.
$fd = fopen ($filename, "r"); // opening the file counter.txt in read mode
$contents = fread ($fd, filesize($filename)); // reading the content of the file
fclose ($fd); // Closing the file pointer
$contents=$contents+1; // incrementing the counter value by one
echo $contents; // printing the incremented counter value

$fp = fopen ($filename, "w"); // Open the file in write mode
fwrite ($fp,$contents); // Write the new data to the file
fclose ($fp); // Closing the file pointer

 

What's up with that include? Shouldn't it be like this?

<div class="footnote">
<?php include ("count.php"); ?>
</div>

 

Thanks. It is still unhappy. I will try a perl counter; the problem is switching to .stml
will require me to create dummy .html file to redirect it to the .stml I gather.

 

This counter works for me:

 $filename = "hitcount.txt";
     $count = file_get_contents($filename);
     if ($count == null)
        $count = 0;
     echo $count;
     $count++;
     $handle = fopen($filename, "w+");
     fwrite($handle, $count);
     fclose($handle);

Code (markup):

 

I back like pesty fly. Thanks for the code. I am still dorking around try to get a counter to count.
I see in O'REILLY "Programming PHP" they embed the php code into the html file so I am trying that
but I do not see any count. Please look at the source at: http://www.bobbear.org/TestWebSite/TestWebSite.html

 

count.php is in the same directory as index.php and in index.php you want to "include" count.php, which open a file, read its content and display the value, right?
So, to avoid misconfigurations, use this

include __DIR__ . "/count.php";

Code (markup):

Same for count.php on opening hitcount.txt.

This should work but better if you can post the directory tree like, eg,

web_directory
├── subfolder
│ ├── counter.php
│ └── hitcount.txt
└── index.php

Code (markup):

 

Thank you all. I found that
<!--#include virtual='counter.php' --> works.
New page: http://bobbear.netfirms.com/PHPTestWebSite2/PHPTestWebSite.shtml see try 0.
I am going to stay away from the server side, they may have cookies there but it is to complex there for me. I am going back to embedded C programming and stay there!