I've long thought that widgets should be retired. Most skins provide a better way to display "about" or "info" pages, the commenting widget might be useful, but once it's discovered by spammers you have to shut it down, etc.

But the visit counter has no analog, especially on jalbum.net hosting, which has no cPanel with things like awtats and Webalizer. It would be nice if jAlbum could provide a visit counter script whose results could be shown on the profile page, rather than cluttering up the album display.

Tough to match Google Analytics' ability to filter out bots, to count only unique visitors, and so on. Unlike the maps API, I don't think you have to provide any credit card info to get an ID. Plugging it into the skin is dead simple - Laza's skins want you to enter the ID, and my skins ask you to copy and paste the embedding code provided by Google (that's a bit of future-proofing, since Google has periodically changed the embed code).