thanks again for your help. i have read through the theming tutorial and i am guessing i need to pay attention to the "custom functions" section. From what i understand, i am suppose to insert <?php require_once('customfunctions.php'); ?> into the image.php file (assuming i want the hit counter to count my image hits) and then create a new file called customfunctions.php with the above hit counter function in it. This is what i did, and i am sure i did something wrong because it's not working.
Questions:
1) where do i insert the <?php require_once('customfunctions.php'); ?> at in the image.php?
2) besides the above mentioned hit counter function, do i need to have anything else in the new customfunctions.php file?
Thanks again for your time, and sorry again for my lack of knowledge in this.