Can't get dumb webcounter working

[J. W. McCall]

Sorry if this is OT, but here's my question:

I wrote a simple python script to increment a counter in a text file, 
and I wanted this script to be accessed whenever an HTML file is 
accessed.  The HTML files and python script are on a shell account on 
UNIX a machine that has support for CGI, Python, etc.  I unfortunately 
don't know much about CGI, since I assume this is what I need to get 
this to work.  All I want to do is to get script to be called when the 
web site is accessed and hopefully insert some output (a number) into 
the HTML.

Any advice, specific instructions, pointers to helpful web resources, or 
recommendations to better newsgroups, if this is too OT here, would be 
greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

J. W. McCall