Short and sweet, I need to have a variable NOT be unset after a page has finished loading. I've used a file to store the value, and I've used a MySQL table with 1 record, and updated/read from that, but I want something cleaner and simpler. Any ideas?
Some people misunderstood the question, so here's an example. At the top of my page, I would have some code such as:
$_PERMANENT['hits']+=1;
print 'Hits: '.$_PERMANENT['hits'];
Note that this works across multiple clients, so it's not $_SESSION.