Thanks for the reply to my question, that worked!  I was getting hung up on the OAuth / callback stuff because that was new to me, it wasn't initially clear that for public data I can skip those steps and just do a normal GET request using my API key.  The examples on the API site are great btw, thanks!  Will implement my little counter tonight.  It might be cool for you guys to eventually just post code snippets for brain-dead things like displaying your project's skull count on your external project website (next to a button that lets people skull the project).  For something like this that would ping the API every time a website is visited, you could recommend how to implement a simple cache that is only refreshed if a few minutes has passed.  Just some ideas floating through my head.