🧮 viewcounter

created  2022/09/17
modified 2025/11/18
category software
views    352

an view counter i wrote for this site

why?

i wanted to have really basic analytics (if you can even call it that) on my website so i could know what pages people are reading with the criteria:

A. doesn't track you

B. can be easily disabled by just disabling javascript

C. lightweight, simple to deploy

how

in about 190 lines of vanilla node.js (60 of which is comments & blanks) viewcounter listens to requests on a single path

if it is a GET request, a summary of all the page view counts are returned

if it is a POST request with a page path as a body, that page's view count is incremented

preventing abuse

there are three mechanisms in place;

1. for every request a counter per its ip is incremented and a timer is set to decrement it, if the counter reaches this number further requests are blocked until it is decremented

2. the sent url is checked against a regular expression, if it passes then viewcounter sends a HEAD request to make sure it's an actual page on the website (and not idk a slur or something) of which the result is cached so further requests to the same url can be quickly processed

3. there is also a 24h ratelimit in place to prevent spam. each ip has a "profile" of when it has last visited a page, if that date is today[^*] then their view is not counted, otherwise the view count is incremented and the date is set to today[^*]

[^*]: today in time of the server