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…
Connect a counter and find its management link
My counters brings access to several owned counters into one browser session. It does not create a new counter or merge visitor identities across websites. Adding a counter requires its…
Share private statistics with a revocable reading link
A management link gives access to counter settings and should stay with the owner. When another person only needs to read private statistics, create a separate reading link. Stats4U gives…
An IP address in a log line
Server access logs form the foundational layer of internet infrastructure, recording every single file request processed by a web server. Each line in these plain text files invariably…
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…
What a password costs on modest hardware
Statistics pages here can be protected with a password. Hashing that password is the one operation in this service that is supposed to be slow — that is what makes a stolen hash expensive…
A backup in the web root is a source leak
Before editing a large file, the natural move is to copy it first. cp index.php index.php.vor-aenderung, then work. If that file sits in the directory the web server publishes, the entire…
A language code that looked like Perl
On 19 August 2026 we added a rule to .htaccess blocking a class of file that should never be served directly to a browser: leftover source-code copies sitting in the web root after an edit…
Why the exclusion list is not hashed
Building a site means opening it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are the author. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own…
A counter on an HTTPS page
A site is on HTTPS. Visitors see a padlock. Then something from another site gets pasted in, and the padlock goes away — or the pasted thing simply does not appear. That is mixed content,…