Mark and GoldLizard,
Wow - this is an old thread! But I think I can help a bit here.
The simplest and probably most frequently used counter is from
Site Meter - Counter and Statistics Tracker - you just sign in and they give you HTML code to paste into your blog. If you are using WordPress you can paste it into a text box in a sidebar widget. They have a free version or you can pay for some extra features.
A more sophisticated package is
Google's new Analytics package. The concept is the same - sign in and it gives you HTML to paste into your site.
There is a WordPress plugin that works with *both* of these packages called
Better Stats Insertion which may help simplify the process for you.