On my personal blog, I just decided to go without any analytics. I feel like I'm writing for myself and to engage a close group of friends. Maybe make some new friends along the way.
I don't want to blog for page views or retweets, it just feels like it creates a bad set of incentives. Ultimately the feeder bar of vanity metrics feels so draining. The important post that 5 people deeply appreciate is just as valuable as a shallow clickbait listicle post that 1000s of people scan through.
This! Exactly this! The moment you start worrying about which posts/pages people looked at is the very moment you start getting sucked into the vortex that's called "pandering to the crowd". The extreme end of that is "clickbait content".
The reality is that one usually does not have large discussion, only one to one exchanges (if any). Email is fine for that, you can always update the post if there aee interesting outcomes.
I've seen a bunch of people just link to HN and reddit discussions of their posts. On my blog I am using utteranc.es, which let's people make comments using github issues. It does require making a github account though. Here's an example of some comments on a post: https://blog.kdheepak.com/writing-papers-with-markdown.html
I think most of us here acknowledge that privacy or "how the sausage is made" generally doesn't sell to businesses & consumers. But I think there's some fertile ground between a self attestation (PCI style) and a $40-50k SOC Audit.
There are a ton of incumbents that at this point could not strip out spyware from their application/data stacks even with 100 human years of engineering effort... could be a competitive advantage for smaller/newer organizations to leverage.
Thanks for sharing the article, SimpleAnalytics, Posthog & Fathom are steps in the right direction. Also shout out to Matomo/Piwik, one of the OG's in self hosted/ Google analytics alternatives.
Together with jivings I'm working on a ethical code of conduct [1]. Please add more if you want. Happy to make this a standard for websites. Maybe add a seal as well.
Looks good, but needs additional specificity / testability.
> No hidden costs
What is a "hidden cost"? Sometimes pricing is complicated. For example, shipping and sales taxes vary based on the customer's location.
> No making it difficult to cancel/unsubscribe from a plan
Maybe: "An authenticated user must be able to review their past and upcoming charges within 2 clicks from the default view. This page must provide immediate options for cancelling/unsubscribing (2 additional clicks to allow for confirmation)."
Or weaker: "Users must be able to cancel/unsubscribe by any mechanism that they can use to sign up / subscribe. For example, if users can purchase a subscription on the website, a they cannot be required to make a phone call to cancel that subscription"
> Automated emails to not self generated mailing lists/social platforms
I don't understand what this means. Are you trying to prevent the companies from using third-party advertising targeting? That seems like an unreasonable ask. It would prevent using Google/Facebook/Twitter for basic marketing tasks.
> No spammy follow up emails
This is not testable. It would be more valuable to identify quantitative best practices and publish those. e.g. "When a user cancels a subscription, do not sent them more than 1 marketing email per month asking them to re-subscribe"
> Allow recipients to easily unsubscribe from mailing-list emails
This should be covered by the "no making it difficult to cancel" clause.
Incidentally, California state law requires transparency around cancellation of subscriptions. Including online cancellation if the sub was started online.
Despite that you would be surprised how many companies still make it difficult and employ dark patterns here. Apparently the WSJ only allows that flow for California residents?
Call me old-fashioned, but if developers really want to minimize their impact on visitors, I wonder why they shifted away from using plain old log files. In the screenshot of the dashboard, "screen size" is the only attribute I see which can't be derived from a web server request log entry.
I was using Analog to analyze Apache logs back in the 1990's -- it's older than JS.
I think it's part of a larger trend of outsourcing logic/services to outside SaaSs. Reminds me of that image posted here on HN of a spider-web of all of the SaaS products that just one company used centered around Salesforce.
For almost every SaaS one can always say "yeah but I can do it myself by doing A, B, and C" but the fact is that time is precious, and if you outsource parts of your website/product, it means for $19 a month you're getting a product that is worked on full-time by 4 engineers.
Analytics from server logging breaks in the cases where either:
- Page navigation often happens client-side (so most dynamic SPAs)
- Content is often cached and/or served from a CDN (so most non-trivial static sites)
In reality, nowadays most page loads don't ever touch the origin server, for a wide range of good reasons. Including analytics in the client-side page sidesteps that whole problem.
CDN could give you your logs though. I think cloudflare gives you analytics for example (not very detailed in the free version, but you can get more by paying).
Because modern web apps/sites don't make tons of requests to look at in logs - they load up the SPA bundle and all the magic of navigation/etc. happens in the browser, with round trips back only to fetch occasional new resources.
And in the Netlify example, they'll sell you analytics based on the logs (adblocker proof) for $9/month. For one case on a site I operate, the numbers are ~2x higher than GA.
This was always the way back before GA really gained traction - a lot of the old school log monitoring analytics basically equated requests as hits (with only some slight filtering) and so the numbers were always inflated (I never normally got to 2x, normally to about 1.5x - but guess it depends on the implementation's filtering of bots, spam IPs etc... Edit: remember we were using AWStats).
Was great being able to spin the traffic figures on our game review site for PRs who didn't understand web analytics at that time.
I also made the switch two weeks ago and I don't miss anything. I even removed google-fonts from my site and host the .woff files myself, so I don't force my users to send requests to Google. I replaced GA with my own self-hosted analytics platform[0] and I plan to add a lot more privacy features to it.
This site collects no analytics and calls no third-party scripts
On the footer of https://remotivo.com and I've already had a couple of people comment that they thought it was a nice touch. I just built this site/bot for a fun side-project, I don't care how many views it gets.
I have been in the process of moving all of my stuff off of Google services (while I have an excessive amount of free time during Shelter In Place. So I recently moved from Google Analytics to https://usefathom.com . I quite like it. I would like to see how many people read my stuff, but I value my privacy and would like to do the same for others. It's pretty good, and
My problem with usefathom is that their analytics hasn't been prooved in court or by a European GDPR data watchdog to be in the clear of not storing personal information. If you only want to ditch GA because you don't trust Google, then I'd also use usefathom.
I think what they do is very clever, but we settled with SimpleAnalytics instead (not as sophisticated and less analytics, but determine unique visitors by referral is cleaner and enough for us).
I'd still prefer Fathom because the data isn't fed into Google's fine-tuned tracking machine. Even if it's not a perfect solution, it's likely better than Analytics in that regard
You can talk to the Google Analytics API directly and control exactly what is sent to Google's servers. This also allows to create custom identifiers for users or sessions, or to track no personally identifiable information at all. A good starting point is Minimal Analytics which also removes lots of unnecessary bloat:
Google Analytics never uses browser fingerprints. The default tracking scripts only use first-party cookies. If you call the GA API directly, you don't even need cookies or local storage. This will make some of the reports meaningless, of course. The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option.
> The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option.
The IP address is inherently sent due to how the internet operates (unless you proxy GA calls through your server, which I'm not sure is even possible).
The option to "truncate" the IP address just tells Google you don't want to store it for your analytics. It has no effect on whether Google still keeps it on their side for their own benefit.
Is anyone using an open source statistics system that's as simple as simple analytics? Maybe even something that can be setup to run stats for multiple clients from our own VPS?
Shameless plug, but PostHog is MIT licensed, open source product analytics [0]. You can use it for super simple pageview analytics and even give all of your clients their own team on one instance.
If you want something more advanced, we're comparable in features to Amplitude or Mixpanel too, but more engineering focussed.
Looks useful, but it depends on PipelineDB, a PostgreSQL extension for streaming data. Unfortunately PipelineDB hasn't been updated since May 2019 [0] when they were acquired by Confluent [1]. The former PipelineDB team appears to be focused on Confluent's KSQL product [2]. There's an open source "ksqlDB" but it appears to depend on Kafka, so it's not a 1:1 replacement for PipelineDB[3].
Yes, I'm relying on the "continuous views" feature of PipelineDB which is like autorefreshing materialized views. I'm planning to swap PipelineDB with TimescaleDB in near future
Most of the heavy lifting is done by Postgres/PipelineDB with Node.js as a simple wrapper so it's both performant and consumes less resources.
> Is there any documented way to let users opt-out sans ublock:o (or other)? Or configure it to respect "Do Not Track"?
I initially wanted to implement DNT but there's a lot of confusion about whether it's useful or not. I'm not sure if there's a standardized way for users to opt-out.
The answer to "will using other analytics penalize you?" is "probably". Now let's rephrase the original question, "Will using other analytics penalize you more than using ones from Google?".
I ran for quite a while without any analytics after removing GA. I've now settled on Fathom for Kubestack.
It was important to me to be mindful about the privacy of my visitors but at the same time I need some data to see if I'm on the right track. Fathom seemed like a good compromise.
How private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is.
The biggest advantage of localStorage is that it is, as its name implies, "local" to the site you are visiting. Cookies can be shared accross domains and sites you visit, but localStorage can not. If one on domain you store `localStorage.ID = 5`, you can not read that from another domain, as `localStorage.ID` will be undefined in a different domain context.
You (the server) doesn't need to know about LocalStorage contents. You can read and write from it via JS without ever sending that data somewhere. It actually improves privacy if done this way, because then the user owns the data and you just act upon it.
Unfortunately Apple thinks otherwise, they clear LocalStorage in Safari after a while by default.
See my comment above, localStorage can not be shared between domains as cookies can. So it's a lot better for privacy. With localStorage you can only track multiple visits of a user on the same site, not across sites.
Both google analytics and google tag manager are blocked in NoScript for me. If your site is using them they're useless for me and my actions on your site. Also every single one of my clients are blocking them too. Part of talk with my clients is to also make them install NoScript + uBlock Origins.
Let me first of all congratulate you. And secondly throw my hat in the ring. We offer a commercial alternative to Google Analytics and have seen massive interest in this space.
Please let us know if you are looking for alternatives.
My personal blog also ditched GA and uses an alternative tool without cookies. Admittedly, it's harder for businesses whose management is steadily being replaced by analytics.
I don't want to blog for page views or retweets, it just feels like it creates a bad set of incentives. Ultimately the feeder bar of vanity metrics feels so draining. The important post that 5 people deeply appreciate is just as valuable as a shallow clickbait listicle post that 1000s of people scan through.