In this new post on the SitePoint PHP Blog today, Harry Fuecks has posted a new item looking at web bugs and how they can be use for good, not evil.

Perhaps one of the most notorious hacks of that nature is the web bug. While web bugs have a bad rap, as a mechanism for tracking users without their realising, their use doesn’t have to be for evil.

As proof of this, me makes mention of a new indexer that the Dokuwiki project uses to make a faster, less resource-intensive search of all of their pages. Each time the bug was loaded, it checked for update dates on the files and reindexed the content if it needed it - thus getting users to actually create the indexing for you via the searches they make...