Hydrus Stat-Track

A Tracker In An Image Tag

Hydrus Stat-Track Lite was my own visitor counter. The description said it "tracks all hits coming to the page. It logs ip, requested url, refering url, os, browser, and date." The misspelling is mine.

Install was four steps: copy track.php to your server, import hydrus.sql into MySQL, set the options at the top of the file, then call it from an image tag. The browser asks for what it thinks is a picture, the script writes a row and sends back a counter graphic, with colors and size passed in the query string as b, f, z and s. Basically a hand rolled tracking pixel.

I wrote my own license for it, four numbered clauses pieced together from the zlib and Nuke headers I'd been reading: don't claim you wrote it, mark your changes, don't strip the notice, and don't sell the source, though selling a service built on it is fine.

I started it in July 2003, and the lite release, version 1.0, was the only one. There was never a full version.