When someone visits your website or blogsite, your web server records information in a log file. This log file is a rich source of information, which I'll be referring to repeatedly, especially in my Perl-Tips blog. Note: For those of you that have a blog hosted on a web server which you have no control over, don't fret. There are several ways you can track visitors. I'll discuss several methods in future posts. In fact, the assumption in this post is that you do not have access to your blog's web server log file.

In this post, Part I, I present a method originally called "pixl tracking". The concept is very simple, and was used in HTML-formatted emails for Internet marketers to detect if and when an email was opened. What you do is place any suitable image file on your blogsite such that it will be accessed by any page of your blogsite, including archived pages. The image does not have to be visible, but I use my profile photo on my Blogger blogs. Each time your image is accessed, this is recorded in the web server log of the web site where your image resides.

While this method is easy to implement, there are a number of flaws:

• The biggest flaw with this is that the image has to live on a web server where you have access to the server log file. If you don't have your own web domain, or a friend with one, you'll have to use another method.
  
• You only get the IP address and the date/time/zone. This method does not tell you where visitors are coming from (i.e., the referring web page).

As mentioned above, I'll present other techniques in future posts.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://geoplotting.blogspot.com