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Tiny websites are great! It's interesting to note that the website content itself for this article is 5,045 bytes (HTML + CSS), but the analytics code (firebas

by trog 6y ago

Tiny websites are great! It's interesting to note that the website content itself for this article is 5,045 bytes (HTML + CSS), but the analytics code (firebase-analytics.js) is 26,458 bytes, and firebase-app.js (whatever this is?) is 19,865 bytes. Not a criticism; analytics is important & maybe the app JS is too. Just think it's worth bearing in mind that it's really easy to blow out your website's total delivery impact to users by several times with third party includes.

anderspitman 6y ago
GoatCounter's[0] analytics script is 2.21KB. [0]: https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/
recursive 6y ago
> analytics is important A lot of times they're not. If you don't have a product, and you're not trying to sell anything, consider the possibility that you just don't need it.
- hagy 6y ago
  Even for small personal projects, analytics can give you a lot of insights into what your viewers like. Things like session duration and bounce rate, broken down by page, can tell what content people enjoy and what contents needs some work. Also useful to know what fraction of your users are recurring versus new users to tell whether people actually return to your site or if they just check it out once. Lastly, the refer stats can help you figure out what other sites and communities are interested in your project so that you can further engage with them.
  - recursive 6y ago
    Some people care about any of that stuff, but it's perfectly reasonable to make a site/page/app that just does something without trying to grow a community or engage or anything.
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    Odd idea: ask them.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Things like session duration and bounce rate, broken down by page, can tell what content people enjoy and what contents needs some work. All those things can be gathered from the initial request if you can set a cookie on the user's machine using a cookie header. If you're Firebase then you'd need a request for firebase-analytics.js to set the cookie, but the file itself could be empty. Also useful to know what fraction of your users are recurring versus new users to tell whether people actually return to your site or if they just check it out once. Once the cookie is set you can get all this from the server side logs. Lastly, the refer stats can help you figure out what other sites and communities are interested in your project so that you can further engage with them. Referers, if they're available at all, come in an HTTP header so once again server side logs would give you this data. There is no reason to serve any JS for logging unless you want browser fingerprinting data like the user's window size. If your analytics script is more than 0kb then you're tracking people.
    - 72deluxe 6y ago
      This is so incredibly true. It's astounding how an entire generation can't be bothered to look at their own server logs and think they need to pipe it off to a third-party to let them present graphs to you. Remember awstats and jwstats?
    - twic 6y ago
      To be fair, you can't tell how long someone spent looking at page using just cookies. You can't distinguish between me (a) loading your page then immediately closing it, (b) loading it, reading it for ten seconds, then closing it, (c) loading it, reading it for ten minutes, then closing it, and (d) loading it, leaving the tab alone for ten minutes, reading it for ten minutes, then closing it. But it doesn't take 50 kB of JS to be able to do that!
      - onion2k 6y ago
        You can't tell if I load a page and then walk away and spend 5 minutes making a cup of tea, and then come back and close the tab without looking at it either. Even with JS. Assuming that having a tab active and focused means a person is engaged with the page is false. Also, believing a page is better because I spend 10 minutes on it rather than 5 is nonsensical. Am I reading everything (good) or am I hunting around for some piece content and not finding it (bad)? Time on page is a stupid metric that doesn't measure anything useful.
markosaric 6y ago
There are also "tiny" solutions for analytics. I'm working on Plausible Analytics which is only 1.4 KB right now and provides a modern dashboard. It also doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect personal data so you're not required to show the cookie/GDPR prompts which would make tiny websites much less tiny. See https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ There's an issue on our Github which will help us perhaps reduce it to under 1 KB too. We're working on that https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/issues https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/issues
- webspaceadam 6y ago
  this looks amazing! I might consider using this for my sideproject and some a/b testing.
- nicbou 6y ago
  If you don't need detailed information about visitors, you can also consider server log analytics.
- def_true_false 6y ago
  You claim that using your analytics doesn't require user consent: > "Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect any personal data. This makes us compliant with the different cookie laws and privacy regulations. It means that you are not required to annoy your visitors with a cookie notice if you’re using Plausible analytics." [1] > "Compliant with privacy regulations: Google Analytics places cookies and collects a lot of data from your visitors. You’re required to have a privacy policy, to show a cookie banner and to obtain consent for GDPR. Plausible Analytics doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track personal data so you don’t need to annoy your visitors or worry about those prompts." [2] It would seem you are collecting PII and processing it server side (?), e.g. calculate_fingerprint here [3]. Care to explain how that doesn't require user consent? [1] https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-with-the-cookie-law-gdpr-ccpa-and-pecr-out-of-the-box https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-with... [2] https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-startup#new-plausible-analytics-individual-product-pages https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-startup#new-p... [3] https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/blob/master/lib/plausible_web/controllers/api/external_controller.ex#L85 https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/blob/master/...

by trog 6y ago

anderspitman 6y ago

GoatCounter's[0] analytics script is 2.21KB. [0]: https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/

recursive 6y ago

> analytics is important A lot of times they're not. If you don't have a product, and you're not trying to sell anything, consider the possibility that you just don't need it.

hagy 6y ago
Even for small personal projects, analytics can give you a lot of insights into what your viewers like. Things like session duration and bounce rate, broken down by page, can tell what content people enjoy and what contents needs some work. Also useful to know what fraction of your users are recurring versus new users to tell whether people actually return to your site or if they just check it out once. Lastly, the refer stats can help you figure out what other sites and communities are interested in your project so that you can further engage with them.
- recursive 6y ago
  Some people care about any of that stuff, but it's perfectly reasonable to make a site/page/app that just does something without trying to grow a community or engage or anything.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  Odd idea: ask them.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Things like session duration and bounce rate, broken down by page, can tell what content people enjoy and what contents needs some work. All those things can be gathered from the initial request if you can set a cookie on the user's machine using a cookie header. If you're Firebase then you'd need a request for firebase-analytics.js to set the cookie, but the file itself could be empty. Also useful to know what fraction of your users are recurring versus new users to tell whether people actually return to your site or if they just check it out once. Once the cookie is set you can get all this from the server side logs. Lastly, the refer stats can help you figure out what other sites and communities are interested in your project so that you can further engage with them. Referers, if they're available at all, come in an HTTP header so once again server side logs would give you this data. There is no reason to serve any JS for logging unless you want browser fingerprinting data like the user's window size. If your analytics script is more than 0kb then you're tracking people.
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    This is so incredibly true. It's astounding how an entire generation can't be bothered to look at their own server logs and think they need to pipe it off to a third-party to let them present graphs to you. Remember awstats and jwstats?
  - twic 6y ago
    To be fair, you can't tell how long someone spent looking at page using just cookies. You can't distinguish between me (a) loading your page then immediately closing it, (b) loading it, reading it for ten seconds, then closing it, (c) loading it, reading it for ten minutes, then closing it, and (d) loading it, leaving the tab alone for ten minutes, reading it for ten minutes, then closing it. But it doesn't take 50 kB of JS to be able to do that!
    - onion2k 6y ago
      You can't tell if I load a page and then walk away and spend 5 minutes making a cup of tea, and then come back and close the tab without looking at it either. Even with JS. Assuming that having a tab active and focused means a person is engaged with the page is false. Also, believing a page is better because I spend 10 minutes on it rather than 5 is nonsensical. Am I reading everything (good) or am I hunting around for some piece content and not finding it (bad)? Time on page is a stupid metric that doesn't measure anything useful.

markosaric 6y ago

There are also "tiny" solutions for analytics. I'm working on Plausible Analytics which is only 1.4 KB right now and provides a modern dashboard. It also doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect personal data so you're not required to show the cookie/GDPR prompts which would make tiny websites much less tiny. See https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ There's an issue on our Github which will help us perhaps reduce it to under 1 KB too. We're working on that https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/issues https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/issues

webspaceadam 6y ago
this looks amazing! I might consider using this for my sideproject and some a/b testing.
nicbou 6y ago
If you don't need detailed information about visitors, you can also consider server log analytics.
def_true_false 6y ago
You claim that using your analytics doesn't require user consent: > "Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect any personal data. This makes us compliant with the different cookie laws and privacy regulations. It means that you are not required to annoy your visitors with a cookie notice if you’re using Plausible analytics." [1] > "Compliant with privacy regulations: Google Analytics places cookies and collects a lot of data from your visitors. You’re required to have a privacy policy, to show a cookie banner and to obtain consent for GDPR. Plausible Analytics doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track personal data so you don’t need to annoy your visitors or worry about those prompts." [2] It would seem you are collecting PII and processing it server side (?), e.g. calculate_fingerprint here [3]. Care to explain how that doesn't require user consent? [1] https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-with-the-cookie-law-gdpr-ccpa-and-pecr-out-of-the-box https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-with... [2] https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-startup#new-plausible-analytics-individual-product-pages https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-startup#new-p... [3] https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/blob/master/lib/plausible_web/controllers/api/external_controller.ex#L85 https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible/blob/master/...