I remember, once upon a time, when websites would have counters, and buggy CGI scripts to update them...

I looked at how people do this now (it's now rare to have a counter), and found that no-one does it anymore.

The current solution seems to require PHP and Mysql - and whilst I don't *mind* this approach (it's not evil), and I already have both on my machine) it does seem *awfully* heavyweight...

And it's complicated - "back in the day", you'd install one script, ref. it in the page, and Job Done (tm).

Now, I can't even fucking work out how scripts are run. There's "magic" somewhere inbetween the webserver and everyone seems to want to proxy everything to long-running scripts with their own embedded webservers. What happened to "do one thing well"? Websites are now shipped as entire virtual machines, and no-one knows how ANYTHING works anymore. Searching for help just spits out thousands of wrong or bad answers. Magic numbers and "Just use this script-looking thing, IDK why it works" seem to abound in this area.

What a total crock.

Are there any remaining web counter scripts (that are maintained)?

Is this Another Dead Bit of the Old Internet?

(I'm running nginx btw).