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I've often wondered why there are so few server-side log parsing libraries (for the likes of Nginx and Apache). Putting that 1x1 pixel image on your front end a
by Uninen 6y ago
I've often wondered why there are so few server-side log parsing libraries (for the likes of Nginx and Apache). Putting that 1x1 pixel image on your front end and serving it from a host that only collects and aggregates anonymous logs about pageviews of each URL would be the best simple analytics most Web site owners would need. Basically the Netlify analytics without the $9 /month/site price tag.
(Yes, it would obviously need a bit more than just a log parser but that would be the easy part, IMO. Separate the backend from the front and let JS folks write their own UI for This Weeks New JS Framework. Maybe you could even use PiratePx as the frontend.)
- shotgunsparkle 6y agoThe reason is because of your health checks, bots, retries, and spam that are hard to distinguish without bespoke whitelisting. Cloudflare analytics suffer heavily from the problems I mentioned.
- atoav 6y agoSo false-positves. Is there any reasonable measure on the amount of false-negatives one would get with traditional 3rd party tracking due to e.g. blocked JavaScript, adblockers etc?
- timetc 6y agoThere are indeed not a lot, but with Matomo (Piwik in the old days) it is possible. You can create analytics based on logs. When you host it yourself and use the correct privacy settings it's a great solution. Like mentioned by other you of course lose a little bit of accuracy and you don't have front-end tag manager related features (like listen to scroll positions and element events). Although you gain a bit of accuracy too, because some privacy tools block analytics calls which isn't possible with the access logs approach :)