When the counter shows a different number than expected
Discrepancies between anticipated traffic figures and actual counter readings represent a frequent source of confusion during website administration. Analyzing these variances requires…
One counter, or one per page
The decision between maintaining a single visitor tally for an entire website or utilizing individual trackers for distinct subpages directly shapes the resulting statistics. Both…
Where a counter fits on a Blogspot blog
Blogspot continues to host many personal and community blogs, often with strict structural limitations. The platform confines custom HTML to designated sections, transforming the placement…
Six generations of counter address, all still answered
The address we document for a counter is /c/<number>-<design>.png. On 30 August it was asked for 156 times. The address from 2006 — /index.php?action=pic&s4uid=… — was asked for 80,499…
What deleting a counter actually touches
Deleting a counter here empties 33 tables. Yesterday it emptied 25. The eight it missed were all created the day before, between 11:10 in the morning and 15:10 in the afternoon. How…
When a cache scales the wrong way
Four small files sit in this service's cache folder. The largest is 35 bytes. Together they hold three counter numbers, and they are read on every single counter request. They exist so the…
Counters that follow dark mode
A counter is an image on somebody else's page. When that page has a dark mode, the image does not know: it was drawn on the server, long before the visitor's system preference existed as a…
How we detect a broken counter
A counter can break quietly. The site gets redesigned, the embed does not survive the move, and nothing announces it — the statistics simply stop, and the owner finds out months later, if…
Caching counter images in memory
Close to a fifth of the counter images this service draws no longer change anything. A mouse-tracking script from the previous generation reloads the image on every movement, and since…
A 2015 script still reloads counters
The previous generation of this service shipped a mouse-tracking script. It loaded the counter image once, normally, and then loaded it again on every mouse movement — with coordinates in…
Counter numbers are now checked against both tables
Every counter here has a number. It appears in the embed code, in the statistics address, and on however many pages the owner put it. Numbers are handed out by picking a random one between…
Putting a counter in a chomikuj profile
chomikuj.pl is a Polish file-sharing community. Every account has a description field, and a great many people put a visit counter in it. When we finally counted where the counters of this…