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> - visitor counters I've kept those alive at w3counter.com since 2004 (before Google acquired Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics). It's not exactly an
by dangrossman 5y ago
> - visitor counters
I've kept those alive at w3counter.com since 2004 (before Google acquired Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics). It's not exactly an in-demand feature so I don't think it's even mentioned on the homepage, but after signing up, you can choose from a couple dozen counter styles, or the standard invisible tracking tag. Been working on redoing that site to re-launch it as a cookieless, zero-personal-data tracker later this year.
Actually I still host https://www.websitegoodies.com/ https://www.websitegoodies.com/ which I originally made in 1999, and that has a simple hit counter service too. So there are some counters I've been hosting for over 20 years.
- cdjk 5y agoWow, I haven’t heard the name urchin in a long time. For the longest time my favorite coffee shop had an urchin sticker on their tip jar. I wonder if it’s still there.
- grp000 5y agoI loved watching those numbers go up between visits! As a kid, I would naively think: "This many new people experienced this as well". Of course thinking back, many of those could have been repeat visitors, but it's still so cool to think about.
- sen 5y agoI remember being so ridiculously proud of myself when I realised I could make a cgi script to write each visitors IP to a text file then on each new visit collate that text file to display a counter of “unique visitors”, then display it next to a normal “hit counter”.. I thought I’d invented the idea of tracking unique-vs-visits. Then I got a job as a web dev for a big(ish) local company and realised every major website was already doing this and just not displaying it.