somebody's home page, mid-1997, the very bottom
You are visitor number
counting...
This page has a modern analytics tag now. You are still being counted. You are no longer allowed to see the number.
This page's counter is served from
/api/counter. There is no dashboard anywhere.
That number is real. It is this guide's own counter, and it went up by one when you arrived. You can see it, and so can everybody else who loads this page. That last part is the whole plate.
From the Web-Counter's own usage page, 1996:
The HEIGHT of the Web-Counter returned image is always 20 (pixels). The WIDTH is calculated as 15 times the number of digits specified. So if you are using the d/4 option, the WIDTH should be set to 4 * 15 or 60 (pixels).
Fifteen wide, twenty tall, per digit. Every captured counter image is 75 by 20, which is five digits. The one above is drawn to that grid, at four times size.
Five cells of 15 by 20. The digits never touch the seams.
There were no settings, there was a path. Every option is a slash-separated segment in the address of the image, so your whole configuration sat in your own HTML for anyone to read.
That string is the whole settings file. Paste it in an
<img> and you are done.
A counter is not a number the page prints. It is an image with a fixed number of slots, and you picked how many when you installed it. -d/5 means five slots forever, whether you have had twelve visitors or ninety thousand.
So a count of twelve in a five-slot counter is not 12
. The documentation
spells out exactly what you get instead:
If your counter value is 12 and you request 4 digits with the -d/4 option, then the web-counter will by default return 12__ (12 followed by 2 transparent spaces). Use this option if you want it to be 0012.
The unused slots are still in the image. Transparent by default, so twelve visitors renders as 12__. Switch -z on above and they fill with zeros: 00012. -r moves the padding to the other side. The count never changed, only which slots got filled.
That is why every counter you remember had leading zeros, and it is why choosing the digit count felt like a bet you were placing on yourself. Five slots said you were expecting five figures.
A real counter. Ask it anything you would ask a dashboard.
Pick a question.
Nothing in the documentation offers referrers, unique visitors, sessions, geography or a time series. The only private capability that ever existed is -h: hide the digits and keep counting.
That is the trade. Total ownership, near-total ignorance. Modern analytics inverted both at once: it answers every question above, and you neither hold it nor get to show it to anyone.
Press it, then scroll back up to the top of this page.
The number is still being counted.
It is
just somewhere else now.
Both tags count. Only one of them tells the reader.
Two named people and a borrowed C library: Tom Boutell's GD, designed and maintained by Gray Watson in partnership with Jason Galanter
. It handled at least 70 requests per second on a 60Mhz BSD/OS Pentium
.
The twenty-eight character sets were not a type library. They were a pile of donated pixel fonts, credited one line each:
Not money. A backlink:
If you are using our free counter servers, we ask you to credit Web-Counter somewhere on your home-page by using its name or logo. Please also put a link to the following URL.
The leaderboard instinct did not wait for social media. digits.com's own 1996 navigation read [ News | Info | Top 10 Lists | Advertising | Commercial ].
One branch kept the image and sold the rest. freecounterstat.com is live, still an <img> counter, still No registration & No Email
. It also offers geolocation and backlink data, loads from a third-party host, and runs Google Analytics.
The other branch gave the ownership back. GoatCounter is open source
and self-hostable, with No tracking of personal data
, so the number can be
yours again if you will run it.
Both are live. Neither one puts the number back on the page where the reader can see it.
-c/16/-d/4/-r/-z/-f/ff5000/name.WIDTH and HEIGHT spelled out on the tag, so
the browser could reserve the space while drawing the page. That one habit dates a page more precisely than anything else on it.
You are visitor number, or
Mr. Web Counter says you're only visitor.
You could know how you were doing without an account, a dashboard, or handing anyone a record of your readers. The number sat on your page in a typeface you chose, and every visitor saw the same figure you did. It was the last time the audience metric was public property.
Nothing was taken by force. Better questions needed more than a number, the things that answered them needed an account, and the account came with a private dashboard. Each step was reasonable. At the end of them, the number a reader used to see first is one they are not allowed to know about themselves.