Question about adding tracking pixels to themes

Tracking pixel wouldn't be a bad idea. I think that'd be my number one option, as it'd be really easy to create and the least obtrusive.

You could use a url shortener and obfuscate the url as well. But I think if someone wants to get around it, they will do it anyway.

This is probably the wrong forum for this discussion (this is more like Programming or Web Design) but I would do this - just my preference. Get Arash Dejkam's FANTASTIC free PHP stats package - TraceWatch Web Stats - FREE Advanced Traffic Analysis. I have been using this since I started in web biz 4-5 years ago and I love it because you can see EVERY visit, nothing gets missed because it's PHP-based. BTW, really useful if you have just set up a new site and you really want to see every single individual visitor in detail, so you can monitor how your promotional efforts are going. Only catch would be if you are getting like a few hits a second or something, then you might have problems. I would implement it like this:

1) Set Tracewatch up on a domain you own
2) Create a blank PHP page on the same domain which merely includes the Tracewatch include code (see the site for all that explanation)
3) create my img src in the theme as a link to that blank page, and bingo, you can have all the stats you want at your fingertips.

That's one idea, I bet there are plenty of others. You could probably do the same thing with Google Analytics, but I don't like the way it reveals itself in the status bar on the browser.

Good luck - I did a similar thing with a Wordpress plugin I wrote. It was kind of fun seeing where my plugin was being used! (and felt kind of illicit too!)

Have a php or perl script on your server that outputs a blank gif.
(pretty simple just outputs the content type of gif and then the data).
In this script it can also take the HTTP_REFERER variable that is set and write that to a database of your choice or to a text file. (You could eradicate duplicates quite easily).

One problem - depending on where you put this tracking pixel it wil appear on every page navigated to, resulting in a call to your server each time.

I can think of another way - a local php script (local to the server with the theme) that calls your server and gets the invisible gif - passing across a variable with the domain name in it (another envronment variable could be used for this. it only does this if a file of a specific name doesn't exist. Once it's made this call it writes a file of a specific name. Therefore never calling your server again.

Sorry for that brain dump.