I Thought I Had Invented Facebook's Pixel 😦
It was 2004 and I was developing a custom email marketing platform for a client—something like a handcrafted Mailchimp, before Mailchimp existed. The system allowed sending campaigns, managing subscribers, and of course... knowing if someone opened the emails.
That last part was where things got interesting.
⸻
The tracker.asp Revelation
I was deep into the project when the lightbulb went off: what if instead of serving a static image, I made a server script pretend to be one?
That's how tracker.asp was born.
I realized I could write an ASP script that responded with the Content-Type: image/gif header and then returned the bytes of a 1x1 transparent image. But before sending the image, the script could do anything: log data, write to the database, parse parameters... whatever I wanted.
So I started including this line in emails:
<img src="https://mydomain.com/tracker.asp?id=abc123" width="1" height="1" />
When the recipient opened the email, their email client would request that image. But instead of a file, it hit my script.
And at that moment, I could:
- Record the date and time of opening
- Read the id parameter from the URL
- Capture the IP and user agent
- Save it all to the database
And then, calmly return a perfectly valid transparent image.
It was a small, invisible, silent act... and I felt a bit like a hacker and a bit like a wizard.
For a while, I really thought I had invented something big.
⸻
...Until I Discovered the Web Beacon
It wasn't long before I stumbled upon the term web beacon—also known as web bug or tracking pixel. It turns out this technique had existed since the late nineties and was already being silently used by advertising networks and email marketing systems.
Yahoo, DoubleClick and company were already doing it. The only thing is that nobody had told me.
So no, I wasn't the first.
But I did come up with the idea on my own. And that, as a developer, is worth quite a bit.
⸻
Same Essence as Facebook's Pixel
Years later, Facebook launched its famous Pixel—a script you install on your site to track user behavior, trigger events, and measure conversions across pages and even domains.
More sophisticated, yes. Based on JavaScript, integrated with Ads, with metrics dashboards and custom events.
But at the core... it's the same thing. An invisible code that tells Facebook what you're doing.
My tracker.asp wasn't that far off. 😱
⸻
So I didn't invent Facebook's Pixel, but I did independently discover how to achieve the same result, because I needed it, about 10 years earlier!
My first book was part of that same curiosity — figuring out what was possible with code and publishing it in 1997.
Kevin Rose had his version of this moment, paying $3,000 to a freelancer to build Digg.
Today you'd discover this in 30 minutes by asking Claude. Thirty years to make the craft obsolete.
📬 Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe for the stuff that doesn't make it onto the blog — half-finished ideas, what I'm reading and listening to, behind-the-scenes notes, and the occasional rabbit hole. No spam, just things worth your time.