About Pixel Tracking

This blog post serves as the about page for tracking.demelo.dev

Background

Tracking pixels are 1x1 images that can be embedded in emails and websites, and allow the sender to capture information about when that pixel is accessed. This is useful for creating read-receipts, tracking users for advertising data, or general information about the users of your site or service.

The Project

The site is built on the following stack

• Gunicorn serving Flask, proxied through Nginx (SSL certs helpfully provided by Let’s encrypt)
• SqlAlchemy as an ORM
• SQLite Database (To be transitioned to a real SQL service is this project is expanded)
• RabbitMQ/Celery for Tasking
• JQuery/JavaScript, as well as a library called DataTables

And hosted on a tiny DigitalOcean droplet

Issues

• Testing this site with adblock enabled leads to a lot of confusion when it looks like nothing’s working.
• GoogleImageProxy serves Gmail clients a cached version of the image, so you don’t get accurate open-counts or IP addresses from Gmail clients. It’s likely many other email services do this as well.