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Prepare for the longest ELFblog EVER!

It seemed like a lot of you people don't really know what I was talking about yesterday, so I thought I would clarify a few things with this blog.
First of all, again, what this project is about is getting a rough idea of how active the ELF is and where the members come from. Instead of asking Pico to build in some fancy Google Analytics scripts I thought it might be a good use for my server to build everything by hand, this also makes the entire process a lot more flexible, because I can change layouts, contents and entire blocks of information in no time and respond to criticism much faster. (For example if anyone has a suggestion for the website)

And here's how it works, this time it should be easy to understand for everyone:

On my computer, which is connected to the Internet as a server, (think of it as something like Photobucket) I have a tiny JPEG picture. It is so small, that it's barely visible to the human eye. Bio and I both have this picture in our signatures in the forum.
Now every time you read a thread and Bio or I posted in it, your computer will automatically display this picture. And in order to do that, it has to load it from my server, obviously. Effectively, my server gets the request "Send picture own.jpg to computer 91.50.145.45 (that being your IP address)". My server not only sends the picture to that computer, but it also writes down your IP address in a text file. A self-written program on my computer then reads that file and does some math with it, finds out if this IP has been here today already, and basically counts how many different computers have requested the picture today, yesterday, all time, etc.

Now basically I could just delete this IP list every day, so that it won't get into the wrong hands, but my program is still under construction and requires a lot of re-starting. In order to keep the information it has produced when it was running last time, it needs to have access to this file, that's why I need to keep it. It also needs to be accessible to PHP so that it can read it. To prevent machines and people who are not allowed to view it from getting access to the file, I gave it a very strange and unrecognizable name, like 9r8ugfbfw8673zt.txt . Apparently, this doesn't prevent Google bots from finding out about its existance though, and because I am a noob I forgot (or rather didn't know how) to tell the server to deny any requests for files inside my "secret" folder, and Google listed the document with your IP addresses in its results.

Rest assured that this did not cause any harm to you or your computer at any time, since the list mainly contained old IP address entries, which are absolutely useless, since your IP address changes every day at least (unless you use a proxy server, like Ivailoto, lol :3)

Of course I had to do something against this by deleting or moving the file out of the server, but that required some effort, since my program and all my websites that use this document need to know where that file now is, and changing something in my program may cause major bugs and thus break the entire mechanism. In order to make sure that the program still works, I needed you to stroll around in the forums and load the picture from above, to make my program do what it's supposed to and see if it does that right, that was all you were supposed to do. Posting replies didn't do anything really.

The situation now:
The entire mechanism has been changed in a way that the document is inaccessible from the Internet without me permitting it (password protection) and all the bugs are fixed. Basically, everything is as before except for the fact that my project is a lot less unsecure o_O.

I have also leaned something from this incident: I can grad Google's attention by hosting documents containing IP-addresses on my server, so I decided to make an html file that contains 500 fake IP addresses (have a look: http://wickersoft...iplist.txt :3). After it is listed in the Google search results, I will change the document so that it redirects to my main homepage, the one of my friend or, most importantly, ELF =)

Thanks for reading! Have a ncie day.