If you want to know who is visiting your site, try reading your server logs.
What would happen to your website (or millions of websites) if one of the CDN's that you rely on started quietly issuing evil code to a few, targeted users? Would you notice? Would your users?
I don't think that it'd be too hard for us to add a simple API call that pokes data about screen resolution, browser agent string, language, etc upon load or login, and it'll be far more efficient and private than us sending random data off to GA or similar where they frequently don't even provide us IP addresses of our own site visitors so that we can correlate the data against our own logs.
The data that GA gathers is highly valuable... to Google. They only provide you visibility of the tippy tip of the iceberg.. but ultimately it's your customers' and your data, not theirs.
Don't compromise your users with third-party includes, even Google Fonts (which is still our last holdout on the website.. hm, someone should make a simple web app that gathers names and styles of fonts and provides a zip w/ pre-generated CSS.)
CDN's sound great but they're a huge privacy hole. Ask yourself; what's the profit model? Are they really just an opportunity to gather valuable data on other people's websites and browsing habits? (yes).
Please don't leak your customers' data.
Also, Google Fonts might be Google Analytics in disguise. Who knows.
I use Piwik for tracking, but the self-hosted version. I don't even use newsletter services. I bought a cheap newsletter plugin for Wordpress which I use as an autoresponder email course.
But delivery is all that matters they say. And yet, all Mailchimp and Aweber and whatnot goes 100% to my spam folder automatically. I believe the delivery argument is a myth.
The best part: Decision making is much easier. "So, your product can't be installed on my own server? Bad luck, I won't become your customer."
You can have the fonts and not have any requests leave your site by using something like this[1]. It downloads the Google font data so you can serve the font files and CSS from your own site.
Most of ours would. Subresource Integrity means that all of our Firefox and Chrome users would get mostly blank pages if our CDN tried to pull anything. It's really hard to justify dropping our CDN when they do so much for our load times for people outside of the US (where our servers are located).
> Ask yourself; what's the profit model?
Well, we pay them, so I kinda thought it was obvious. I suppose they could be selling data as well, but it doesn't seem like a great strategy to endanger so much of their userbase when there's already a clear and profitable monetization model.
What would happen if EC2 started quietly issuing evil code to a few, targeted users? Would you notice? Would your users?
What would happen if Digital Ocean started quietly issuing evil code to a few, targeted users? Would you notice? Would your users?
I used http://www.localfont.com to retrieve the Open Sans font I was previously using from google font. Maybe that's the kind of webapp you are looking for.
(sorry if I'm an annoying old fart in the rest of this remark but I went back to desktop software 15 years ago (yes that sounds weird) and the last 2-4 years I have more and more troubles understanding discussions on modern web development as everything that was once considered Very Bad is now not only encouraged, but taken as the natural state of affairs - e.g. javascript for core functionality, the 'css is bad, do it in javascript' movement, 'semantic markup should not even be attempted', 'frontend frameworks', ...)
So yeah my question is not sarcastic, I'm just asking for some context.
I suppose there is a job of work to be done downloading the top 1Million web sites and seeing what crap comes through the door - but would be nice to know what the OP is replacing and with what so I know what is derigeur these days
Maybe just that you can look at Piwik analytics - open source and you can host it yourself.
Html/dynamic pages, images, CSS, js, fonts, analytics all from the same server (or at least same domain), and as much squashed together to avoid requests, that was the 'best practice' when I was still 'current'. I don't really understand either what else there would be.
Actually, GA only provides you with a [meager] subset of the data that Google gathers. Now it's their data.. not yours, and not your customers. They won't even give up IP addresses so that you can check it against your own logs.
Of course. They can just ask people.
Let's not pretend that all this data is for developers. It's only for a) advertisers to shit more on your users, and b) sales to micromanage the site into getting more conversions, usually at the cost of utility.
Just prepare your web{site,app} and have the webserver serve it to my browser. If it is too large for my screen, my browser has these newfangled things called scrollbars to deal with it, and I will see that my screen is too small to comfortably view content you graciously share with me.
The same way as desktop developers do. Test things yourself and get you mother (or some non-techy person) to try it out and see how much she/he swears when attempting to use it.
Well, did - I regret to tell you that desktop developers are now using analytics as well, using stuff like DeskMetrics and Trackerbird.
Most ads would be unblockable if you made the ads come from your domain and have them indistinguishable from your normal content in the URIs as far as I know.
This will mean advertisers can't count exact hits to their ads (or at least would be foolish to do so) so they will probably have to employ some kind of web crawler or HIT services to randomly sample the sites who are supposed to be serving their ads to make sure they are.
But eventually the blocker technology will become much better at blocking page element ads more easily and automatically. Then I guess they will have to think of something else.
Or does client side mean the user downloads JS which does some investigation and reports back?
It's no more pointless than using Adobe Typekit for fonts or pulling jquery from a CDN. Both of these use a lot more bandwidth than an analytics ping, BTW.
The use of bandwidth is a moot point. If advertisers hadn't abused the user's good will we wouldn't be where we are today, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Users don't really need webfonts; text just needs to be readable. And they don't need to grab jquery from a CDN; it can come off the server. Heck, they don't need to grab anything from a CDN--the app server can serve images just as well as Cloudflare.
Do users really need DDOS protection? No, that protects the server, not the user. And it banks their legitmate request--needlessly--through a proxy server, which certainly adds latency. Not to mention that Cloudflare can see everything they're browsing.
Do users need single-page JS apps at all? Why not just render HTML4 on the server like in the good old days?
So why do developers use these technologies? Because it makes the user experience better. And so do analytics. Without analytics, developers are flying blind. And no, Apache/Nginx logs don't capture the same data--especially with more advanced JS-heavy sites.
Users want websites that load fast and are easy to use. It is impossible to build or improve such a site without data upon which to base decisions. That's why analytics are a necessity.
No, it can't, at least not in general. That's what others here are trying to explain to you. It can be very useful, and in both the visitors' and the host's interests, for someone operating a site that has a lot of client-side interactivity to see what's really going on, for example.
Somebody please kill HTTP-DASH