title: Creating a simple hit counter in Rails
body: <p>I've been trying to implement the <a href="https://github.com/charlotte-ruby/impressionist" rel="nofollow">gem Impressionist</a>, but as the doc is confusing and the gem carries a bit of overhead for my simple use case I wonder how I could go about implementing this myself?</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>I want to track impressions (requests) of a certain action in a controller.</p></li>
  <li><p>The impressions don't have to be registered by unique visitors.</p></li>
  <li><p>I need the counter to be unique to each record in the model (i.e. Shop 1: 34 hits, Shop 2: 77 hits etc).</p></li>
  <li><p>The counter should not include requests from bots on this list: <a href="http://www.user-agents.org/allagents.xml" rel="nofollow">http://www.user-agents.org/allagents.xml</a></p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What would be the minimal code required to accomplish the above?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong></p>
  
  <p>To clarify, if possible I <strong>don't</strong> want to use the gem Impressionist. I only used that as a prelude to describe what problem I'm trying to solve.</p>