The guestbook and the counter
During the formative years of the world wide web, the visitor counter and the public guestbook were nearly always found together. Both elements served as essential tools for transforming a…
What replaced the counter, and what it cost
The transition from the visible counter to the invisible analytics platform marked a fundamental shift in how web traffic is measured and understood. In the early days, knowing the total…
The hit counter as a web tradition
The visible hit counter represents one of the earliest established traditions of the independent internet. During the late nineteen-nineties, establishing a new webpage almost universally…
Choose a counter design that stays readable
A counter should fit the website, remain readable on a phone and leave the main content in control. In Stats4U, the design gallery provides a live preview and installation code. A useful…
The right to a copy of the numbers
Data protection regulations grant individuals the right to request a copy of their personal information and to understand exactly how their data is being utilized. When a website integrates…
The counter still runs after ten years
Countless websites have integrated a visitor counter years ago and left the code untouched since. During the past decade, web technology has shifted significantly, yet a simple HTML image…
An endpoint that answers with nothing
There is a path on this server that does nothing. A rewrite rule catches it and returns 204: no content, no body, no work. On 30 August it was called 1,000 times. What it used to be The…
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…
What stats2.gif actually is
There is a file in this project's image folder called stats2.gif. It is 366 bytes, dated March 2018, and it appears in exactly zero lines of source code. On 23 August 2026 it was served…
Three columns left over from Stats4U 2
The main counter table here has 166,436 rows and a number of columns that look like they matter. Three of them are lastdomain, firstdomain and userdomain. They hold data: lastdomain not…
We stopped collecting screen sizes
This service used to record screen resolution. The browser script read window.screen and sent it along as res=1920x1080, and the statistics page had a panel for it. It does not any more.…
The who-is-online list, promised in 2012 and now live
On 25 August 2012, a post on this blog announced that the statistics fields had started refreshing by themselves, and finished with a sentence: "The planned feature, the 'Who is online'…