I spent some time last night working on a badge for America Held Hostage.  I originally designed it with a database backend to track unique referrers. I imagined this would help me indicate the number of supporters on the badge, similar to the way you can use a badge with feedburner to indicate the number of subscribers you have.

However, this idea had a couple of problems. For instance, when you add the badge to your site footer, you get a unique referrer for each page. This would also be a problem virtually everywhere else you added it.

Plus, a limited number of users wouldn’t help the bandwagon feel. No one wants to join a movement with 5 adherents.

In light of this, I went with a countdown instead. You can see this on the right sidebar of this site.

You can add this badge to your site with the following code:

<a href="http://www.americaheldhostage2.com/" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.americaheldhostage2.com/badge.php" border="0" alt="" />
</a>

This yields the following result:

These instructions can be found here.

I will post instructions on how I created this badge soon.