[Bogdan’s] latest project is a box that displays web hits for a chosen site. He calls it the Ego Box because depending on how traffic goes it either bloats or crushes your ego. This provides similar functionality as our Troll Sniffing Rat but the biggest difference is that this is a stand-alone Ethernet device. That’s thanks to the ENC28J60 Ethernet controller chip which manages the stack and has been quite popular in DIY electronic projects. In order to monitor your hits [Bogdan] crafted a bit of code to add to the header of your index page. It increments the counter file each time the page is loaded, and the Ego Box simply monitors that file, displaying the traffic on an eight digit 7 segment display.
[via Adafruit]
Arduino + ethernet shield to do the same thing?
Wtf? Whose ego is affected by the number of hits their page gets!?
@Jake is clearly not subject to human feelings the rest of us are subject to ;)
I mean,who doesn’t refresh the page hoping for a torrent of comments/views/downloads on your latest webapp/blogpost/API to launch you into a veritable internet celebrity?
Or, for the more practical among us, hoping that a fraction of those hits will turn over into ads!
That was a interesting way of saying, “Yeah, my ego mimicks my monthly pageviews!”. :P
Oh man. MS3FGX has to get one of these.
:( cannot generate ad-revenue BC Google no rikey me.
When it hits 99999999, does the next visitor to the site receive a free hat?
Well, looking around, the 100000000 visitor to pages is always me, and I always get offered a great prize, so yeah, a free hat would sure be one of the things that it could be ;)
Also when it gets to there, he would have to get out a sharpie to add a digit
I am into search engine marketing and have thought about making something like this, but instead having it be a ticker that shows ranking positions
What happens when it reaches its limit?Can we edit/exploit the counter script to crash the device?
@PeachPit well said.
@goose when the counter will pass over the 8 digit limit the box will simply display the first 8 digits of the number, so you will lose precision but it will not be a malfunction.
I don’t really see any way you could modify the script to crash the device. The box simply reads a file and takes out the first 8 (or less) characters of it and displays them. In case those are not numbers, it will just display garbage.
I used to have a site that got about 12 hits – per year.
@Whatnot if you would be using some blogging system like wordpress and have coments enabled you would probably get more spam messages than 12 a year :)
I should add a hit counter to my site, but I don’t really know how many people visited. Hmm, maybe I could use youtube insight to see how many video views were from the players embedded on my site…