The story so far...

I've always used SiteMeter to store statistics about you, my readers. It was very simple to implement, but recently too many people have been commenting how "unprofessional" it looks to have a hit counter.

Now, although I don't agree it's unprofessional, I did think it would be fun to write my own version.

The simple specifications were:

• To be accessed through an <img> tag
• To store the page being viewed, the referring page, the readers IP address, browser and screen width.
• To cope as well as possible with client-side script disabled

As it turned out, this was quite easy. I'm storing the information in my handy Access database, so you can view the raw data or see sample reports.

To be honest, with this latest addition I'm now worried about how Access will cope with the strain. This table will get very large, very quickly. Time to break open that fresh SQL Server 2000 DVD...

Part 2: The Footer script...