The tracker got smarter

The tracker is still one script tag. That hasn't changed. What changed is what it sees.

Persistent visitor identity across sessions — without cookies, without storing PII. The system distinguishes returning visitors from new ones using lightweight client-side signals. No personal data leaves the browser, just enough to tell "new" from "returning."

Bot and AI crawler detection, so analytics aren't polluted by scrapers. Browser and OS classification. Traffic source domains. Owner activity filtering so my own obsessive clicking doesn't skew the numbers.

One fun addition: first-party subdomain proxying. Ad blockers are increasingly aggressive about blocking third-party analytics scripts. Routing the tracker through a CNAME on your own domain sidesteps that entirely. Dogfooding it on roarke.io.

Everything runs client-side. One line of HTML, same as day one.