8 ms·

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire

• chimeracoder 11y ago
  > I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Unless I'm mistaken, one big difference is that not using Google Analytics means you don't know which Google search pages people used to access your website. That can be a really important difference for some websites.
  • cgag 11y ago
    I think you can get that info with webmaster tools without using analytics.
  • aargh_aargh 11y ago
    Can't you find out from the Referer header anymore? It's been years since I tried, so it may have changed.
    • kalleboo 11y ago
      Only if your site is HTTPS
• splatcollision 11y ago
  Looking for a good npm / express middleware module that does this. Combines privacy concerns + developer laziness!
  • justinkramp 11y ago
    Maybe https://crypton.io/ https://crypton.io/
• rplnt 11y ago
  Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many. 1. https://piwik.org/ https://piwik.org/
  • Albright 11y ago
    Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software
    • nateguchi 11y ago
      Who makes these lists?!
      • blowski 11y ago
        Well you can see the list of users here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_analytics_software&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_analy...
      • bencollier49 11y ago
        Good question! Probably the vendors of the software concerned. Perhaps it started out as a list of three with a major bias towards a particular product. And then the competitors responded, moderators did their things and eventually an accurate list was evolved.
    • Someone1234 11y ago
      Strangely Microsoft's one is missing: Application Insights. Pretty much works like Google Analytics but utilises both client JavaScript and embedded runtime code to generate a richer picture of what is going on. Too bad the interface on the Azure Portal is terrible. They spent too much time making it look fancy, and not enough time getting the 101s of usability right (which is a criticism I'd lay at the feed of the new Azure portal in general).
    • tux3 11y ago
• beerbajay 11y ago
  > Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. It's almost never "developers" who are deciding to use GA; it's middle managers or marketing departments.
  • k__ 11y ago
    Well, it's not a thing to implement in a few days, but a few weeks. That maybe no option...
    • MichaelGG 11y ago
      If you can reimplement GA in a few weeks, you need to do this over December, then enjoy your FU money. GA is rather deep, with tons of integration and ways to slice and segment data. Yeah, maybe in a few weeks you can get _something_ that'll give you something that'll make some manager not too unhappy. Seems like a terrible value prop for almost all companies since, unfortunately, approximately no one cares (or they run adblock anyways).
      • k__ 11y ago
        I mean implementing a analytics tool that does what you need. If you do it just for yourself, you don't need all those fancy things, so it is often doable in a few weeks.
      • angersock 11y ago
        If it takes you more than a few days to put together a basic analytics platform and reporting system, you're a script kiddie. Not hard to track page hits, time on, time off, and arbitrary events. EDIT: Seriously? Folks, it's a table for analytics events, a few SQL queries to do basic reporting (at least in Postgres), a little bit of client-side JS to post the events, and a bit of server-side code to create the routes and maybe display the report page. I guess if it doesn't include Kafka, Mesos, Kubermetes, Neo4j, and Docker, it isn't delivering business value. ffs.
        • Moru 11y ago
• jkestner 11y ago
  And GA is inscrutable. I don't use it very much because it's got way too many layers of abstraction. It was fine before as Urchin. Maybe this is a category like email clients — there should be a sustainable paid product that doesn't suck.
  • morninj 11y ago
    Maybe http://haveamint.com/ http://haveamint.com/ is what you're looking for? (I'm not affiliated--just a former user.)
  • fiatjaf 11y ago
    There's also http://get.gaug.es/ http://get.gaug.es/, which seems great. I have gone through their trial, but now I think I will register for the Solo account ($6/mo).
• efuquen 11y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of laziness. More so where is it best to spend your expensive/valuable developer resources, on the product or some home-baked analytic's framework? I applaud SpiderOak, but they are much different from most other sites. They have privacy conscious customers to begin with, this is something that is good press for them and probably a net positive on their bottom line for doing it, not the case with most other sites. Also it's something they are doing after having a very mature product for many years, clearly not the first or most important thing they needed to tackle as a company.
  • IE6 11y ago
    Agreed - for some cases just pasting the GA snippet onto a site is sufficient. For others you should add events and such. For others you must roll your own.
  • marcosdumay 11y ago
    If it's worth A/B testing your site, it's worth doing it with a tool that understands your costs and revenue structure. GA is mostly used by people that don't need it, yet want to pretend they get actionable data out of it.
• digi_owl 11y ago
  > thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Frankly most of what i read out of the tech world these days seems to be about pandering to developer laziness. All manner of APIs and services seem to exist in their current form simply to extract rent from developers that don't want to do back end "dirty work".
  • jessaustin 11y ago
    Being paid for doing work by those who need the work done is the opposite of "extracting rent".
    • pdkl95 11y ago
      Being paid for doing work has nothing to do with extracting rent, which is the practice of inserting yourself as a middleman so other people have to pay you "rent"[1] where none should be required. The entire idea behind writing a Service as a Software Substitute[2] is about extracting rent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking [2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...
      • hsitz 11y ago
        I understand Stallman's dislike of SaaSS in [2], but I fail to see how it meets any definition of rent-seeking. People who provide SaaSS are using economies of scale to offer services that are desirable to some, because they're offered at a cost that is less than the cost of developing and maintaining their own private solution. There is certainly a loss of freedom in using these services, as Stallman points out. But rent-seeking, not so much. Users of SaaSS need to decide whether the cost savings of using SaaSS is outweighed by the freedom they give up. Nothing more, so far as I can tell.
      • oldmanjay 11y ago
        I feel like someone needs to rewrite Stallman's missives to eliminate the term redefinition and the connotation management. His usage of these rhetorical techniques is far too ham-handed to be persuasive to those who aren't already convinced, even when his message is important.
• ascendantlogic 11y ago
  That starts going down the path of the "not invented here" mindset. You could then attribute not hand-rolling every bit of infrastructure yourself as "laziness". Yes, I am lazy to the point that I don't want to hand-roll an industrial-strength RDBMS myself, or the operating system, or the networking protocol, or the key/value store, etc etc.
• untog 11y ago
  And I never quite grasp why many people working in the tech sector are insistent on reinventing things that already exist. Such thinking thrives on developers' personal sense of exceptionalism in my opinion.
  • seanwilson 11y ago
    Yeah, a nontrivial app is comprised of so many parts, if you tried to reinvent a few of them yourself you'd never get anywhere. Also, try looking at the commit history and issue lists of seemingly trivial libraries. It's incredibly easy to underestimate how complex something that looks simple at first can be.
• redthrowaway 11y ago
  It's not laziness, it's opportunity cost. For SpiderOak, it makes sense to spend a few weeks of a few developers' time to roll their own analytics. For me, it doesn't. Our customers aren't privacy-focussed. In fact, our app depends on them explicitly sharing [quite a lot of very personal] data with us. I would rather spend that time building something that delivers value to them and us than indulging my personal beliefs about privacy.
• raverbashing 11y ago
  Most developers don't develop (major) libraries, languages and OSs in house, it doesn't mean they are lazy, it means the company need to focus limited resources on their core business.
• onion2k 11y ago
  If all you want to know is who accessed a site, with which browser, how long for, and which pages they looked at then you could get all that from your webserver's log files without writing any code. On the other hand, to build something that's robust, relatively scalable, works across browsers and devices, and can give you an event watching platform like GAnalytics gives you (eg the useful bit), that is far from trivial.
• bluedino 11y ago
  >> Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Every service does. Pingdom, GA, Olark, Github... It took them a few weeks to write their own analytics. What features did they not implement? How many people worked on it? Does your 1 or 2 person startup have 4 weeks to write their own analytics package or do you have more important stuff to do? (I'm betting you do. Like launching your product instead of re-inventing the wheel with analytics)
• Retra 11y ago
  Everything developers don't do is a matter of laziness if you ignore the fact that they might have other priorities.
• morgante 11y ago
  Having implemented two different custom analytics dashboards, it's a lot more complex than you think. Sure, the basics are easy. But marketers and business people want to drill into a lot of data which is non-trivial to gather. Unless you have a compelling business case (which SpiderOak does), it's not worth it.
• fiatjaf 11y ago
  I've replaced Google Analytics in all my projects with my CouchDB-only web analytics service, Microanalytics[1], which I could access from a CLI[2] and worked very well. But then I started to fall short on disk space for storing too many events. This is a problem. [1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics [2]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics-cli https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics-cli
• gedrap 11y ago
  >>> I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Ah, the "not invented here" syndrome! There are tons of things that you could do "in a couple of weeks" that more or less work. However, it doesn't mean you have to or even that it would be a good idea. If all developers adopted the attitude that you have expressed, there would be thousands of sad sad developers who need to maintain shitty in-house analytics system because someone once said "I could do it in a week". There are tons of awful CMSes already because someone once said "I could do better than wordpress" / "I could create a better framework" / etc. In a lot of the cases, GA is just good enough. Sure, you might need to spend some time to explore its features (custom dimensions, etc), there's more to GA than a number of pageviews for a given day. There are cases when GA is not enough. Fair enough. But it's definitely not the majority of the cases. Sure, it makes sense for SpiderOak given it's target audience. However, there's no need to make such a generic statement about 'anyone working in the tech'.
  • EGreg 11y ago
    The answer is open source. Where is the wordpress to google's analytics product?
    • gedrap 11y ago
      Piwik, Snowplow, etc. They do exist. Then the question is do you really want to maintain the infrastructure required to run the analytics smoothly? Especially if your company has dozens of millions of pageviews a month and depends on the real time needs (extra infrastructure to support that). Are you familiar enough with the stack so you could have a high degree of confidence that you can fix productions issues which are inevitable? Quite often, an honest answer here is 'no'. Then can you afford to lose a few hours/days/weeks (whatever it would take to fix the issue) of data? Again, often the answer here is 'no'. Of course, you have hosted solutions. But they are no better than GA in terms of privacy. Paid support exists too but the cost can skyrocket pretty quickly, on top of paying for the infrastructure and maintaining it.
      • 11y ago
• yoo1I 11y ago
  A lot of people are replying to the suggestion of implementing your own analytics by calling out it's NIHness. I've recently been faced with this problem, and a solution doesn't have to be too complex. There are roughly two parts to an analytics solution: event logging and, well, the actual analytics. Writing your own logger in javascript is super simple, you're just sending off json objects to be inserted into a elasticsearch cluster. Since you have to define that logging anyhow, the only extra work you need to do is the layer to do the actual ajaxrequests. What's left is running and defining your queries in elasticsearch. BAM! Analytics I realize it's not fit to be used for every situation, but it can so some pretty complex things this way without the hugest amount of effort ...
  • gedrap 11y ago
    I get what you are trying to say and I was one of the NIH-sayers, it totally makes sense in some cases and looks like it made sense in your case. Great! :) I don't think anyone was saying that GA is always better, it's just more often than not it is. It takes some skill and quite a bit of experience to draw the line at a reasonable place and correctly recognize the trade offs.
• ubersync 11y ago
  Don't the ad blockers disable Google Analytics by default? If I am not wrong, I think uBlock Origin does. So, I think, as more and more people will start using ad blockers, site owners will start getting less and less accurate stats from Google Analytics, forcing them to implement their own solutions. Hopefully, open source solutions will start providing the best features that Google does.
  • Moru 11y ago
    Anything that is widely used (open source or not) will be blocked because of common names or other patterns that can be recognized and blocked. If you need exact statistics you need to roll your own sooner or later. Or at least heavily customize some other product.
• tootie 11y ago
  much of what we used analytics for anyway Until your requirements grow and your stuck building something that was in GA 5 years ago.