Here is a handy little script you can use.

<?php
  //saves ip address and timestamp
  $str=date("Y-m-d H:i:s") . ": ". $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "\n";
  file_put_contents("ip_list.txt", $str, FILE_APPEND);
  header("content-type: image/gif");
  //43byte 1x1 transparent pixel gif
  echo base64_decode("R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAAAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==");
?>

What the above does is simply logs the IP address of the site visitor and the time they visited to a plan text file in the root directory. It then displays a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF file to the browser.

Why the output of a GIF file? So that you can in any of your HTML documents just put and it will call the script and display a transparent GIF. So it won’t affect the way your website is being displayed, but it will still record the visitor’s details. It also doesn’t rely on javascript, which is always a plus for me.

You can expand the script even more by changing it to include more statistics. You can make it as complex or as simple as possible.