4 ms·

Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid f

by munk-a 7y ago

Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a difference.

saagarjha 7y ago
For a light site, Google Analytics may be the majority of its “weight”. It’s not huge, but I’d like to think my readers came to my site for the content and not the analytics so it’s a bit ironic that the ratio doesn’t match that.
maple3142 7y ago
I have a blog hosted on GitHub pages, and I only want to know what pages are viewed the most. Before using GA, I have considered multiple alternative. For self-hosted alternatives, I don't bother to use it because I don't want to maintain a server just for my blog. As for other paid hosted alternative, I avoid them because I want it to be as cheap as possible. So I eventually choose GA, but in a different fashion, because I do care about its bloat. I simply write a short JavaScript using Measurement Protocol[1] to only send pageview to GA, which works very well for me. [1]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1 https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
- bewuethr 7y ago
  I was in the same situation and ended up using GoatCounter (see one of the top level comments in this thread).
throwaway894345 7y ago
I've used GA before for this same blog, and the bloat was perceptible. Not only that, but the GA interface was poor and there was a lot of spam. Adding onto that the various ethical concerns (privacy and Google's questionable politics), I decided to go with something else. Also, to reemphasize, the primary purpose of the blog and its infrastructure is to serve my own amusement and to indulge my technical interests.
clairity 7y ago
> "...a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states..." while it's a whole lot less signal per site, long-tail websites can provide more signal per visit than large ones. knowing you like kazakh folk music more uniquely identifies you for targeting than knowing you read cnn. and for small sites, you don't often need a lot of data. just knowing number of visits and some basic visitor characteristics (country, time, etc.) on a per-page basis is usually as much as you need to make use of. depending on the business, a large site can and possibly should build custom analytics as a competitive advantage that doesn't have google (and facebook, amazon, etc.) looking over their shoulder. nobody really needs GA. many don't even need realitme analytics afforded by a js library loaded on every page. you can just do log analysis, à la the original urchin analytics that google bought long ago.

by munk-a 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

For a light site, Google Analytics may be the majority of its “weight”. It’s not huge, but I’d like to think my readers came to my site for the content and not the analytics so it’s a bit ironic that the ratio doesn’t match that.

maple3142 7y ago

I have a blog hosted on GitHub pages, and I only want to know what pages are viewed the most. Before using GA, I have considered multiple alternative. For self-hosted alternatives, I don't bother to use it because I don't want to maintain a server just for my blog. As for other paid hosted alternative, I avoid them because I want it to be as cheap as possible. So I eventually choose GA, but in a different fashion, because I do care about its bloat. I simply write a short JavaScript using Measurement Protocol[1] to only send pageview to GA, which works very well for me. [1]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1 https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

bewuethr 7y ago
I was in the same situation and ended up using GoatCounter (see one of the top level comments in this thread).

throwaway894345 7y ago

I've used GA before for this same blog, and the bloat was perceptible. Not only that, but the GA interface was poor and there was a lot of spam. Adding onto that the various ethical concerns (privacy and Google's questionable politics), I decided to go with something else. Also, to reemphasize, the primary purpose of the blog and its infrastructure is to serve my own amusement and to indulge my technical interests.

clairity 7y ago

> "...a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states..." while it's a whole lot less signal per site, long-tail websites can provide more signal per visit than large ones. knowing you like kazakh folk music more uniquely identifies you for targeting than knowing you read cnn. and for small sites, you don't often need a lot of data. just knowing number of visits and some basic visitor characteristics (country, time, etc.) on a per-page basis is usually as much as you need to make use of. depending on the business, a large site can and possibly should build custom analytics as a competitive advantage that doesn't have google (and facebook, amazon, etc.) looking over their shoulder. nobody really needs GA. many don't even need realitme analytics afforded by a js library loaded on every page. you can just do log analysis, à la the original urchin analytics that google bought long ago.