The visit counter at the top of this site (the "visits" bar) and the comment box under each blog post are both powered by Nostalgic.
What Nostalgic is
Nostalgic is a free service that brings old-school hit counters, likes, rankings and guestbooks (BBS) to static sites that have no backend of their own. kako-jun built it. Each counter or board is identified by a "URL + token" pair, and you add it to a page with a small snippet.
- Home / docs: https://nostalgic.llll-ll.com/
Why this site uses it
llll-ll is a static site built with Zola; it has no database or server of its own. To still show "how many people have visited" and let visitors "leave a short comment," it uses Nostalgic.
- Visit counter: the Total / Today / Yesterday / Week / Month figures in the visits bar are real counts returned by a Nostalgic visit counter.
- Comments: the comment box under each article is a Nostalgic BBS. Comments are returned as an image, so they're readable even with JavaScript turned off.
On your own site
You can add the same thing to your own static site or blog — no server, no database required. If you're curious, take a look at https://nostalgic.llll-ll.com/.