pixel-ping

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Pixel Ping is a minimalist pixel tracker, written in CoffeeScript for Node.js. It's useful when you want to keep track of page hits, but don't want to inject something heavy like Google Analytics. It has no dependencies other than Node.

To use Pixel Ping, you insert an image tag that records the hit, along with a unique key that is used to distinguish the hits. For example:

The key can be any string -- a document id, the url of the page, etc. You'll probably use a snippet of inline JavaScript to generate the key based on the URL of the page, and other relevant information. For an example of some JavaScript that generates the key, see the "with-tracking-js" branch.

Pixel ping will store all of the keys and hits in memory, and periodically flush them to your application by making an HTTP request. You should make an endpoint on your application that can save results from JSON like this:

{ "/pages/about.html": 276, "/articles/policy.html": 324 }

The key being the key you passed to the image tag, and the value being the number of hits since the previous flush.

To configure Pixel Ping, add a "config.json" file in its directory, or supply a path to the configuration file when starting it up. An example of the configuration looks like this:

{ "host": "127.0.0.1", "port": "9187", "interval": 600, "endpoint": "http://www.example.com/internal/save_hits" }

Running "node lib/pixel-ping.js path/to/config.json" will start up the pixel server on 127.0.0.1:9187, and every ten minutes (600 seconds), it will flush the hits to the provided endpoint.