This domain was registered in 2007 and I set up this blog, but I had not put much time in making things count on this blog. I hope at least its a start now !

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You obviously make a website or blog for others to see it, hence you would be anxious to know how many visitors your website or blog is receiving.

Web Analytics

You may go through an introduction to web analytics to get some fundamental idea behind web visitor tracking.

We usually track website visitors using third party web analytics solutions – for example in this blog, I have used StatCounter and Google Analytics. Both uses JavaScript based data capture technique. You may go reading in detail about them at how web analytics data collection happens, but for you, implementing this is very simple – Just copy-paste the JavaScript code snippet provided by these vendors into each page of your website. You are done, you can see reports on respective vendor websites.

Leaving a website without being tracked is the biggest crime you can do after launching your website ! Firstly you will not have any clue whether are there any vistors or what they do on your website.

Google Analytics and StatCounter are just two of such providers, in fact these two provide the service for FREE! So there is no reason for you for not trying them !

So, now will you tell me how many visitors your website/blog got ?

While working for NatNif.com project, I had to track the emails (in fact XMas greetings) sent by people to others, whether its viewed, whether the viewer has signed up at NatNif.com or no..

Tracking whether the email is viewed

This is possible only if the mail format is HTML. Tracking is achieved by placing a 1X1 image pixel in the body of the image, which carries a unique id for the email to the particular recipient.

The major threats here are,

1. Images get displayed only if you allow them in display while viewing the email message.
2. You cannot embed a pixel in this way i.e <img src=”track.php?id=3454″ /> . Most of the spam filters will remove such dynamic URLs present in image tags.

Out of the above 2 , we do not have any control on the first one. Second one can be solved replacing the dynamic image URL with a innocent looking URL like ‘track-3454.gif’ . I have used Apache’s mod rewrite to process these innocent looking image URLs and take out the id from it and do the tracking.

Next thing which need to be taken care is the links present in the body of the email messages. We can create links with URLs like

http://www.mysite.com/track.php?id=3454&dest=http://www. mysite.com/actual-destination.html .

So here instead of keeping a direct link to

http://www. mysite.com/actual-destination.html

, we are goinging to the tracking page, which tracks the link clicked and finally shows the real destination. In the tracking page, using the id in the link, we can find out which recipient has clicked and come to the site.

If you have any more related info, please feel free to share.

Anyone here to answer why is it so?

[Update]
See the spike upwards ! It was recent..