Intro
In the starting years of the Internet, you saw them everywhere: small pictures of counters indicating how many people had visited the page. Usually they could do only that: count the number of times the page had been requested. Nowadays we have stuff like Google Analytics, webbugs and website log-parsers, so the humble hitcounter has disappeared.
Recently, I got a bag of old electronics from a friend of mine, and in a
box I was about to throw away, I could see a small black box with two wires
sticking out. The device picked my interest: there aren't a lot of devices
that size with only two wires. It turned out to be a
mechanical impulse counter.
As soon as I saw the little device, I immediately thought of the hitcounters seen in the starting days of the Internet. This counter would have an additional advantage, though: every time a person requests a page from my site, the counter would give a satisfying 'Click!'. The more clicks you hear, the more people reading your pages. The gratification from having visitors on your page couldn't be more instant. I immediately started devising a way to make the counter click from my webserver.
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