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Okay, the cynic in me wants to write "New Age web designers are stumped by lack of analytics while still refusing to look at their HTTP server log data." I rem
by ChuckMcM 6y ago
Okay, the cynic in me wants to write "New Age web designers are stumped by lack of analytics while still refusing to look at their HTTP server log data."
I remember when the ONLY analytics were those you could derive by analyzing your http logs. Which have useful information in them. Things like source IP address (which can be geo tagged), a bunch of HTTP headers (which are full of information too), and a timestamp which tells you when it came in and from where. Not to mention session cookies which take zero javascript to implement.
I've been retooling my site slowly to only use these analytics (less the cookies) because I value people's privacy while browsing as much as my own. During the transition I've been comparing what I can pull out of the logs vs what Google's analytics gives me. Sure, Google can do wonders, especially if the person is coming from a browser where they are logged into Google. But, as the article points out, they miss everyone running noscript and/or other privacy enhancers like Privacy Badger from EFF.
I don't feel like I'm going to miss the Google added insights.
- neonate 6y agoThis is pretty funny, buried in the middle of the article: > Option 2 – Server-Side Tracking
- ChuckMcM 6y agoWith advice that this is so technically complex, don't even look there. These guys can write java script that animates a web page so that it looks like a turning page and its "too technical" to pull data out of a server log?
- LaundroMat 6y agoThe article talks about sending first-party analytics events to an analytics provider from your own servers. So the server-side tracking the article refers to is similar to the server-side tagging Google recently announced[1], not the analysis of server logs. [1] https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/serverside https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/serverside
- neonate 6y agoOk, thanks for the correction.
- GrantZvolsky 6y agoI recently decided not to use GA on my site in favour of server logs for all the reasons you mention plus one that I see as the most important: it would require me to annoy users with a cookie consent banner.
- butterfi 6y agoThe last time I processed my own web logs I used Urchin. What are the good choices these days for log processing?
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI don't know, I just use perl to extract the data and feed it into influx. Then I pull data sets from influx into numpy and process it how ever I want.