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I was doing some usability testing in one of my webapps and needed a simple way to count conversions. There are lots of A/B testing solutions out there, but I just wanted a persistent count I could increment on specific user actions. So I created the ArbitraryCounter.com.

I find it useful, but I'm wondering if anyone else might. What do y'all think?

PS. This is WAY beta, and mainly a proof-of-concept. But I'll continue developing it if there's an interest it.

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Perhaps POST requests would be more appropriate for incrementing/decrementing?

GET's may be either cached(skipped) or duplicated for various reasons, resulting in incorrect counts.

Can someone explain how counters can be so hard to implement ourselves that we need to use this?

It's probably not that they're hard, but rather that they might require some boilerplate code and bloat that somebody might want to offload to an external service like this one.

The idea was to make something easier than booting up a database. Personally, I just needed a semi-persistent count that I could discard later. This fit the bill for me, and being able to retrieve the counts via JSON, I can easily add them to my Geckoboard dashboard.

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