5 ms·

You don't need analytics on your blog

67 points by woodruffw 3y ago

lbrito 3y ago
>the only way I track traffic trends on this blog is with vbnla, a hacky little Ruby script that summarizes my Nginx access log. This is literally analytics. I didn't read the rest of the post, so if you're arguing against things like GA, fine, I'm with you. But any kind of analytics, even GA, ultimately does the same thing, just with a ton more complexity and additional tracking sources. FWIW this is what Ive used for a long time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The post is about browser analytics; this is in the second sentence. It's possible you skipped that to get to the part about the script. (I disagree that this adds any complexity or tracking sources. It's a 70 line script that took me about half an hour to write, and has required no significant changes since I wrote it ~5 years ago.)
  - michaelsalim 3y ago
    Not the original commentor but I've never seen the term browser analytics used before. That certainly doesn't help. Maybe client-side analytics would've been clearer.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      This demonstrates my overall ignorance of analytics terminology :-). I'll add a footnote clarifying this, thank you.
  - lbrito 3y ago
    Re: added complexity, I was referring to analytics solutions like Google analytics: it adds a ton of sophisticated tracking stuff, but is ultimately a server (well, more like several thousand) somewhere with logs registering visits, not so fundamentally different from your script. I also do a very similar thing (also in Ruby!). Apologies for the lack of clarity, English can be so ambiguous.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      No problem at all, thank you for clarifying!
the-smug-one 3y ago
You don't need tracking period. You don't know who, or even if anyone, reads yor blog.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I think there are good logistical reasons to have logging; I enumerated some of them in the post. Besides logistical reasons, I think there's very little value in refusing to acknowledge that many people find attention to be a useful motivator (even if it isn't the best or right motivator). The point of the post was to communicate that you can track a blog's attention without relying on third-party services or hosting your own heavyweight analytics solution.
shafyy 3y ago
Taking this opportunity to tell you about my open-source side project: I've built a very simple event-based analytics solution some time ago. You can simply host it yourself and track basic events. It's not possible to track any personal information, not even IP: https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu
alexmolas 3y ago
One of my 2024 goals is to write more and better. This 2023 I've written more than ever, but I've focused more on visits than on quality. This year I want to focus on getting better at writing. This article has convinced me to turn the analytics off, or at least to not check it as frequently as I do it now.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I don’t have any on my blog at all. I just let go of any interest in knowing.
Ameo 3y ago
Knowing that people read the stuff I write is the only motivation I have for writing at all. If all my posts are seen only by bots, then the hours I spend making them are pointless. I really enjoy the light-weight analytics I use for my personal blog. I self-host plausible; it has no cookies or persistent tracking. Just user counts per page, device types, and stuff like that. There are zero valid privacy concerns from this setup. I get a ton of satisfaction from seeing a spike in traffic to some post and then tracking down the tweet/reddit post/etc. that caused it.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  I think the point was you don't need client side analytics (i.e. the "putting analytics on a page" type). Your server logs are more than enough to get all the information you're talking about.
- curiousWaste 3y ago
  Same but i use self hosted umami
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Could you describe how you set this up?
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Not the above commenter but I used Coolify on Hetzner to self host Plausible and other services, works great. https://Coolify.io https://Coolify.io
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Interesting, I write just to have those ideas in the wild, not necessarily that anyone would actually read them. I will say that I have a private "blog" or journal as well as my public one. My private one is usually for day to day musings while if I find an interesting enough idea, I polish it up and "promote" it to the public blog on my website.
- Zetobal 3y ago
kstrauser 3y ago
Don’t need ‘em. Sure enjoy having ‘em. I use self-hosted Matomo to see what people are reading. And much like profiling any program I’ve written, the hotspot is always something different from what I’d have expected. Having analytics doesn’t change what I write. I still enjoy the information.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Right, but the point was you don't need on-page analytics for that. Seeing what people read (and when, and from where) is already in your self-hosted server logs, or is one "enable server logs" setting away.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    How can you know what they've read inside an article? Sometimes I'll embed Hotjar and similar services into my site just to see the heatmap of what people have mouses over or text selected. Still looking for an open source self hosted version though.
    - crtasm 3y ago
      This to me is intrusive and creepy. Glad I can block Hotjar easily and do not wish to have to check for self-hosted scripts doing it.
      - satvikpendem 3y ago
        Not sure you can block self hosted Hotjar type scripts if I just embed them into the JS bundle itself for the site. You could try disabling JS but most people won't, and I could also disallow text being rendered if there's no JS. Not that I would do any of this of course, since I like no JS sites as well as SEO for my blog posts, but it's a hypothetical of what one could potentially do.
        crtasm 3y ago
jonas21 3y ago
Note that IP addresses are personal information, so if you're logging them like this, you'll need to get consent (or have some other legal basis) and also handle deletion requests for EU users. One of the many joys of GDPR compliance.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  These logs get rotated out after a week, and fall well within the "purpose limitation" clause of the GDPR.
- dexterdog 3y ago
  On a personal blog? Good luck enforcing that. If I host the thing myself and your IP address is reaching into my network to read my blog you have to expectation that I'm not going to record the data if I care to.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Or, you know, it's a personal blog: you don't, because access request IPs are part of how TCP/IP works (it's literally in the name) and cannot identify a person unless your website has a user management system and logs IPs in tandem with session id activity so that that the IP can be resolved to "a person". This is one of those "if someone wants their IP scrubbed, they can request it, but lol no" situations: for blogs run by regular folks instead of services run by businesses, just pointing to "it's in the GDPR" is not enough. The GDPR gets a LOT of things intentionally wrong so it can go after PII-gathering-so-that-can-be-monetized businesses.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  cgnat
- mortallywounded 3y ago
  I log traffic. I use log rotate with a 30 day rotation. No one can complain because it's gone within a GDPR compliant window of 30 days.
kurtfunai 3y ago
You make a good point. I just removed GA from my blog.
japanman185 3y ago
[dead]
dahart 3y ago
> I removed them in back in 2017, with no discernible negative impact on my writing motivation In other words, “I don’t need analytics on my blog”? Sure, some people don’t need it, and sure focusing on analytics can have downsides, but why assume or project your assumptions on others? Maybe the slightly dramatic or hyperbolic title is something the author learned by watching analytics or seeing what other popular blog titles do… ;) For anyone who wants to reach a wider audience, analytics can be great. Speaking from experience trying to write a blog for a startup -- analytics will show you that the things you care about aren’t the things your audience cares about. :) Analytics can help you learn what topics engage your audience. They can also show you how when you go deep and technical on things, hardly anyone reads to the end or engages. But! Sometimes those kinds of posts will have much more staying power in the long run. Personally analytics helped me bring more balance and variety to my posts, and not shun the deep dives necessarily, just avoid overdoing them. That was nice in a way because it made writing easier; I thought I needed to do a long high quality piece every time, and that assumption was wrong.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  It's a post about a personal blog; I don't think the claims in it necessarily apply to a corporate or startup blog, where business interests may trump what (in my opinion are) healthy personal blog-writing habits.
  - dahart 3y ago
    Sure, though the title doesn’t say ‘your personal blog’, so if it was meant for a subset of blogs, that’s another way it’s making assumptions and could have been more specific… but then it wouldn’t have people reacting to it! ;) Personally, I think my point is valid for personal blogs too. Writers who would like to grow their audience can benefit from seeing the analytics. I don’t know what healthy writing habits are… I suspect my HN commenting habits aren’t super healthy. ;) It’s definitely possible to focus too much on analytics, my point is simply that saying “you” don’t need them at all is perhaps silly. They’re a useful tool, one of many.
    - 3y ago
BobaFloutist 3y ago
Of course you don't. You don't need your blog either. But analytics are a fun toy to mess around with, much like your blog is.
ttiurani 3y ago
I reached a similar conclusion with my own blog[0] and run a small rust process that parses access logs. However, I could only find a need to know which posts are popular and which give 404 errors, nothing else. I'd argue that for big chunk of personal blogs, collecting general geographic and/or traffic sources isn't actually useful nor justified. [0] https://tiuraniemi.org/blog/site-setup#_statistics https://tiuraniemi.org/blog/site-setup#_statistics
abound 3y ago
If one wants server-side analytics with a little more info than the author's "hacky little script", there's always goaccess [1], which functions in broadly the same way. I even use it with Firebase Hosting-hosted sites via [2] (which I wrote). [1] http://goaccess.io/ http://goaccess.io/ [2] https://github.com/Silicon-Ally/gcp-clf https://github.com/Silicon-Ally/gcp-clf
kugurerdem 3y ago
This was a nice and short essay. I think that it can be hugely motivating to see your essays reaching people. However, as the author pointed out, it can also be demoralizing if the ratings are lower than expected. With that in mind, I don't think we should stop traffic analysis. The issue seems to lie in our initial expectations. I plan to apply some analytics, but I don't necessarily anticipate high ratings. Also the author probably isn't advising us to completely discard analytics. He actually provides us with a simplified method for it. I think what he tries to do is to suggesting that we should not obsess over it too much. I agree that if analytics demotivate us from writing, it might be best to completely remove it.
mortallywounded 3y ago
Instead of the simple Ruby script, I think GoAccess is better. It's a simple command line tool available in nearly all package managers. You can simply pipe your logs to it and get an ncurses based summary of the site. zcat /var/log/nginx/access.log* | goaccess
ishanjain28 3y ago
The worst offender for this I ever saw was a analytics company using their SDK on their blog. It was generating 1 request a second logging absolutely completely stupid metrics(for a blog) and my local DNS resolver was filled with >100k requests from a tab that was not even in the foreground! Took a little bit of effort tracking down the tab generating this traffic and now they are banned from my local network forever.

67 points by woodruffw 3y ago

>the only way I track traffic trends on this blog is with vbnla, a hacky little Ruby script that summarizes my Nginx access log. This is literally analytics. I didn't read the rest of the post, so if you're arguing against things like GA, fine, I'm with you. But any kind of analytics, even GA, ultimately does the same thing, just with a ton more complexity and additional tracking sources. FWIW this is what Ive used for a long time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051

woodruffw 3y ago
The post is about browser analytics; this is in the second sentence. It's possible you skipped that to get to the part about the script. (I disagree that this adds any complexity or tracking sources. It's a 70 line script that took me about half an hour to write, and has required no significant changes since I wrote it ~5 years ago.)
- michaelsalim 3y ago
  Not the original commentor but I've never seen the term browser analytics used before. That certainly doesn't help. Maybe client-side analytics would've been clearer.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    This demonstrates my overall ignorance of analytics terminology :-). I'll add a footnote clarifying this, thank you.
- lbrito 3y ago
  Re: added complexity, I was referring to analytics solutions like Google analytics: it adds a ton of sophisticated tracking stuff, but is ultimately a server (well, more like several thousand) somewhere with logs registering visits, not so fundamentally different from your script. I also do a very similar thing (also in Ruby!). Apologies for the lack of clarity, English can be so ambiguous.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    No problem at all, thank you for clarifying!

the-smug-one 3y ago

You don't need tracking period. You don't know who, or even if anyone, reads yor blog.

woodruffw 3y ago
I think there are good logistical reasons to have logging; I enumerated some of them in the post. Besides logistical reasons, I think there's very little value in refusing to acknowledge that many people find attention to be a useful motivator (even if it isn't the best or right motivator). The point of the post was to communicate that you can track a blog's attention without relying on third-party services or hosting your own heavyweight analytics solution.

shafyy 3y ago

Taking this opportunity to tell you about my open-source side project: I've built a very simple event-based analytics solution some time ago. You can simply host it yourself and track basic events. It's not possible to track any personal information, not even IP: https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu

alexmolas 3y ago

One of my 2024 goals is to write more and better. This 2023 I've written more than ever, but I've focused more on visits than on quality. This year I want to focus on getting better at writing. This article has convinced me to turn the analytics off, or at least to not check it as frequently as I do it now.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

I don’t have any on my blog at all. I just let go of any interest in knowing.

Ameo 3y ago

Knowing that people read the stuff I write is the only motivation I have for writing at all. If all my posts are seen only by bots, then the hours I spend making them are pointless. I really enjoy the light-weight analytics I use for my personal blog. I self-host plausible; it has no cookies or persistent tracking. Just user counts per page, device types, and stuff like that. There are zero valid privacy concerns from this setup. I get a ton of satisfaction from seeing a spike in traffic to some post and then tracking down the tweet/reddit post/etc. that caused it.

TheRealPomax 3y ago
I think the point was you don't need client side analytics (i.e. the "putting analytics on a page" type). Your server logs are more than enough to get all the information you're talking about.
curiousWaste 3y ago
Same but i use self hosted umami
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Could you describe how you set this up?
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Not the above commenter but I used Coolify on Hetzner to self host Plausible and other services, works great. https://Coolify.io https://Coolify.io
satvikpendem 3y ago
Interesting, I write just to have those ideas in the wild, not necessarily that anyone would actually read them. I will say that I have a private "blog" or journal as well as my public one. My private one is usually for day to day musings while if I find an interesting enough idea, I polish it up and "promote" it to the public blog on my website.
Zetobal 3y ago

kstrauser 3y ago

Don’t need ‘em. Sure enjoy having ‘em. I use self-hosted Matomo to see what people are reading. And much like profiling any program I’ve written, the hotspot is always something different from what I’d have expected. Having analytics doesn’t change what I write. I still enjoy the information.

TheRealPomax 3y ago
Right, but the point was you don't need on-page analytics for that. Seeing what people read (and when, and from where) is already in your self-hosted server logs, or is one "enable server logs" setting away.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  How can you know what they've read inside an article? Sometimes I'll embed Hotjar and similar services into my site just to see the heatmap of what people have mouses over or text selected. Still looking for an open source self hosted version though.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    This to me is intrusive and creepy. Glad I can block Hotjar easily and do not wish to have to check for self-hosted scripts doing it.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Not sure you can block self hosted Hotjar type scripts if I just embed them into the JS bundle itself for the site. You could try disabling JS but most people won't, and I could also disallow text being rendered if there's no JS. Not that I would do any of this of course, since I like no JS sites as well as SEO for my blog posts, but it's a hypothetical of what one could potentially do.
      - crtasm 3y ago

jonas21 3y ago

Note that IP addresses are personal information, so if you're logging them like this, you'll need to get consent (or have some other legal basis) and also handle deletion requests for EU users. One of the many joys of GDPR compliance.

woodruffw 3y ago
These logs get rotated out after a week, and fall well within the "purpose limitation" clause of the GDPR.
dexterdog 3y ago
On a personal blog? Good luck enforcing that. If I host the thing myself and your IP address is reaching into my network to read my blog you have to expectation that I'm not going to record the data if I care to.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Or, you know, it's a personal blog: you don't, because access request IPs are part of how TCP/IP works (it's literally in the name) and cannot identify a person unless your website has a user management system and logs IPs in tandem with session id activity so that that the IP can be resolved to "a person". This is one of those "if someone wants their IP scrubbed, they can request it, but lol no" situations: for blogs run by regular folks instead of services run by businesses, just pointing to "it's in the GDPR" is not enough. The GDPR gets a LOT of things intentionally wrong so it can go after PII-gathering-so-that-can-be-monetized businesses.
sitzkrieg 3y ago
cgnat
mortallywounded 3y ago
I log traffic. I use log rotate with a 30 day rotation. No one can complain because it's gone within a GDPR compliant window of 30 days.

kurtfunai 3y ago

You make a good point. I just removed GA from my blog.

japanman185 3y ago

[dead]

dahart 3y ago

> I removed them in back in 2017, with no discernible negative impact on my writing motivation In other words, “I don’t need analytics on my blog”? Sure, some people don’t need it, and sure focusing on analytics can have downsides, but why assume or project your assumptions on others? Maybe the slightly dramatic or hyperbolic title is something the author learned by watching analytics or seeing what other popular blog titles do… ;) For anyone who wants to reach a wider audience, analytics can be great. Speaking from experience trying to write a blog for a startup -- analytics will show you that the things you care about aren’t the things your audience cares about. :) Analytics can help you learn what topics engage your audience. They can also show you how when you go deep and technical on things, hardly anyone reads to the end or engages. But! Sometimes those kinds of posts will have much more staying power in the long run. Personally analytics helped me bring more balance and variety to my posts, and not shun the deep dives necessarily, just avoid overdoing them. That was nice in a way because it made writing easier; I thought I needed to do a long high quality piece every time, and that assumption was wrong.

woodruffw 3y ago
It's a post about a personal blog; I don't think the claims in it necessarily apply to a corporate or startup blog, where business interests may trump what (in my opinion are) healthy personal blog-writing habits.
- dahart 3y ago
  Sure, though the title doesn’t say ‘your personal blog’, so if it was meant for a subset of blogs, that’s another way it’s making assumptions and could have been more specific… but then it wouldn’t have people reacting to it! ;) Personally, I think my point is valid for personal blogs too. Writers who would like to grow their audience can benefit from seeing the analytics. I don’t know what healthy writing habits are… I suspect my HN commenting habits aren’t super healthy. ;) It’s definitely possible to focus too much on analytics, my point is simply that saying “you” don’t need them at all is perhaps silly. They’re a useful tool, one of many.
  - 3y ago

BobaFloutist 3y ago

Of course you don't. You don't need your blog either. But analytics are a fun toy to mess around with, much like your blog is.

ttiurani 3y ago

I reached a similar conclusion with my own blog[0] and run a small rust process that parses access logs. However, I could only find a need to know which posts are popular and which give 404 errors, nothing else. I'd argue that for big chunk of personal blogs, collecting general geographic and/or traffic sources isn't actually useful nor justified. [0] https://tiuraniemi.org/blog/site-setup#_statistics https://tiuraniemi.org/blog/site-setup#_statistics

abound 3y ago

If one wants server-side analytics with a little more info than the author's "hacky little script", there's always goaccess [1], which functions in broadly the same way. I even use it with Firebase Hosting-hosted sites via [2] (which I wrote). [1] http://goaccess.io/ http://goaccess.io/ [2] https://github.com/Silicon-Ally/gcp-clf https://github.com/Silicon-Ally/gcp-clf

kugurerdem 3y ago

This was a nice and short essay. I think that it can be hugely motivating to see your essays reaching people. However, as the author pointed out, it can also be demoralizing if the ratings are lower than expected. With that in mind, I don't think we should stop traffic analysis. The issue seems to lie in our initial expectations. I plan to apply some analytics, but I don't necessarily anticipate high ratings. Also the author probably isn't advising us to completely discard analytics. He actually provides us with a simplified method for it. I think what he tries to do is to suggesting that we should not obsess over it too much. I agree that if analytics demotivate us from writing, it might be best to completely remove it.

mortallywounded 3y ago

Instead of the simple Ruby script, I think GoAccess is better. It's a simple command line tool available in nearly all package managers. You can simply pipe your logs to it and get an ncurses based summary of the site. zcat /var/log/nginx/access.log* | goaccess

ishanjain28 3y ago

The worst offender for this I ever saw was a analytics company using their SDK on their blog. It was generating 1 request a second logging absolutely completely stupid metrics(for a blog) and my local DNS resolver was filled with >100k requests from a tab that was not even in the foreground! Took a little bit of effort tracking down the tab generating this traffic and now they are banned from my local network forever.