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I used to be a sysadmin and have my tools to know what I wanted ;) https://github.com/jul/yahi

I care about stats as a junkie and I see this as vanity or OCD.

Best solution at my opinion is to not care and just practice.

That looks like a very nice solution, and probably covers what most people would want out of Google Analytics for a simple site. Like you said, for a personal site, stats are for curiosity and the vanity/need to know how many people came to the site. But still, that's not quite true - you might start writing more articles about a topic which got lots of traffic, for example. That's not mere vanity or OCD, that's site optimization.

For a simple site, weblogs probably give enough information to perform site optimization. I do think that there are lots of stats any website of sufficient scale needs to fine-tune operation/marketing which are NOT available via weblogs and in fact require some JS to be on the page.

There should be a way to get this limited information without infringing on privacy and without having data gaps from ad blockers.

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