PJ: Tell me about this tracker you coded, what’s up with it?

Phil: Well, my tracker—it’s actually more of a log, really—records and displays details of the last 20 hits on my MySpace page. It currently shows the hit number, the IP address of the visitor—which is about as close as you can get to ascertaining the identity of the viewer—and the time and date.

It works by including an “image” tag, with the value of the “src” property pointing to a made-up JPG on my web-server. In the .htaccess file for my server, I have created a redirect from this JPG to a PHP file which logs the visit—and all its relevant details— in a database. It then queries the database for the last twenty hits and returns them as an image file.

PJ: How did you get interested in programming a Myspace tracker?

Phil: I began thinking about making some sort of tracker after having watched my number of profile views slowly creep up over time. I thought it would be interesting to learn more about who these people were. I think it’s only natural to be interested in the people who are interested in us. To that end, I thought I’d develop some sort of way of seeing who these mystery visitors were.

It was also something I had never really seen done before. I had seen the ceaseless trail of spam which linked to websites which professed to show you who views your profile, (but instead only steals your password,) but had never seen such a system implemented. Admittedly though, 90% of the MySpace profiles I have viewed belong to my friends, and web-design isn’t really a hobby of theirs.

The final reason I decided to go ahead with it was because I have always seen MySpace as a sort of sand-box. I know it’s frowned upon for encouraging awful standards and for generally polluting the Internet with a meeting-ground for the bewildered and the confused, but I like it. I enjoy playing with it and trying out new things. It was through idle experimentation that I created my “multi display-pic” system, and so too was it that through the opportunity to play around, my log-viewer was borne.

PJ: And what have you learned so far?