This may be a silly question, but how do I save variables that are not specific to a particular session. An simple example of why you might want to do this would be a visitor counter - a number that increases by one each time someone visits a web page (note - I'm not actually doing that, my application is different, but that is the functionality I need). The only ways I can think of doing this are either writing the variables to a file, or putting the variables into a database. Both seem a bit inelegant. Is there a better way to to this kind of thing?