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>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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoNot 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 agoThis demonstrates my overall ignorance of analytics terminology :-). I'll add a footnote clarifying this, thank you.
- lbrito 3y agoRe: 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 agoNo problem at all, thank you for clarifying!