It was 30 years ago today

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In February 1996, I came up with a way to measure and report website traffic remotely. I put an image on my ‘HTML Corner’ website, served from my own server, named it Nedstat (the directory needed a name), and built the first version. When the page loaded, a file was updated on the server. Clicking the image triggered a Perl script that reported: last 10 visitors (due to a bug it was 11, don’t ask) visitors per day, per hour, per country. Real time. Simple. But this idea didn’t exist yet. I thought immediately: this could be something big.

I emailed the ‘Surprising Site of the Day’, a Dutch cool-site-of-the-day equivalent, run by Hans Veldhuizen. We already knew each other; I built a lot of sites and had been featured before. He wrote back: HTML Corner is nice, tomorrow you’re SSotD, but what’s on it, that Nedstat, that beats everything. We need to talk.

Nedstat on Michiels blog

It was 30 years ago today