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So I’m in the “I don’t give a crap about analytics” camp. I don’t use GA or similar tools and I occasionally run my server logs though go access if I want to ge

So I’m in the “I don’t give a crap about analytics” camp. I don’t use GA or similar tools and I occasionally run my server logs though go access if I want to get a sense of what’s going on. From my experience, neither of the two methods is bulletproof. GA clearly can’t track people with ad blockers and server logs don’t suffer from that problem. But they do suffer from extreme noise. RSS requests, bots, scrapers, you name it. There’s a lot of crap mixed with regular humans visiting my site. At the end of the day, I think logs are fine if you just want to get a broad picture of what’s happening. I do believe people with personal blogs shouldn’t care about analytics at all. Just focus on the content and ignore the rest.

rollcat 2y ago
> [...] server logs don’t suffer from that problem. But they do suffer from extreme noise. RSS requests, bots, scrapers, you name it. There’s a lot of crap mixed with regular humans visiting my site. Looking at the raw logs is pretty pointless at any scale, unless you're investigating a specific production issue. There are analytics tools that ingest server logs, filter/aggregate the data, and make pretty dashboards. I used to use something that I found in the Debian repos long ago, can't remember the name now, coz > I do believe people with personal blogs shouldn’t care about analytics at all. Just focus on the content and ignore the rest. This.
- manuelmoreale 2y ago
  Well I’m not suggesting that one should look at raw logs. I’m suggesting using something like https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/