Show HN: I built Analytics for my Ghost blog | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built Analytics for my Ghost blog

ghostboard.io

76 pointsdburgos35 comments

And pardon my thoughts but: if you say "I built Analytics for my Ghost blog" I come expect at hacker news "function and code". What I see there is "I built Analytics for your Ghost blog to pay for" aka advertising for a paid service. Its great, yes, but the headline feels ... wrong?

Agreed. Seems like a cheap tactic to bait and switch what we think is the classic hobbyist HN post with a commercial service.

If it seems like a petty complaint, imagine when more and more people do it. This title should be considered clickbait.

Nothing wrong with the honest title of “Show HN: Analytics for Ghost Blogs.”

I expected at least a blog post launching the product... not just a landing page.

You can find that post here: https://davidburgos.blog/my-first-app-of-turnindiechallenge-... I was sharing the product itself

> On 10th August, at 11:16 AM ES I found it at the Hacker News Homepage, position #16:

You should say "it reached front page" instead of "I found it". Since you were the one who posted it, it shouldn't come as a surprise it's there.

You're right, I just updated it, thanks!

sorry, I got the point, I'm not a English native speaker and I will try to double check it before post it, thanks for the message!

Congratulations on launching!

Don't worry if you don't get much positive feedback here -- this seems like the kind of functionality that doesn't impress the HN crowd, but could become very popular among more often less-technical, actual Ghost users, quietly making you lots of money if marketed/advertised properly.

let's see, thanks very much for your message!

The writing style reminds me of /r/dogecoin; that's probably not the vibe you're going for. I'm viewing this on a 20+ inch monitor, and it's clipping on the right side. You might want to limit the max-width and center your content.

made me laugh! wow really? I just try to explain the best way I can but no bad intention. Sorry for the issues and thanks for reporting, I will investigate it and fix

Looks neat, kinda what I expected from the Ghost Dashboard that was always on the roadmap and the Kickstarter pictures back in the days. It never got built apparently.

Yeah that's why I built it :) thanks for your message!

Or just configure https://www.awstats.org/ to parse your server side logs. It's one of those things that worked for the past 18 years.

EDIT: server side logs have serious advantages: no tracking cookies needed, so no cookie consent needed. Once the parsing done, the actual logs can be purged, so GDPR compliance is fine. It's not fancy, that's true, but it gives you quite a nice overview; enough for most blogs out there.

Oh the classics. I've started to use http://goaccess.io/ a lot these days.

You are right but in this way, comparing to Ghostboard, you will get only analytics about visits (page, device, time, etc.) and missing some specific-blog data like posts per month, SEO, content performance, etc.

Looks pretty cool! We've built something similar for Google Analytics to make it easier to monitor traffic growth etc.

Here's a link: https://chart.ly/products/google-analytics

By the way... would be cool to see your own stats for this site, assuming it is a Ghost site! :-) . That would be a great lead magnet as well! (like demo.baremetrics.com is for Baremetrics)

What do you get out of this that you don't get from putting GA on all pages other than the small SEO recommendations?

It's not (yet) blocked by adblockers, and it doesn't add more fuel to Google.

Excellent! I've been looking for something really simple and straight forward like this. A ton of analytics suites out there are geared towards engagement, user tracking, get-in-the-funnel type BS, but this looks really focused on what you would want to measure in a blog!

thank you! One of my goals it's to keep really simple to setup and to use :)

A quick note that the layout of the site is really broken - lots of things overlapping each other - on a not-terribly-big screen with MacOS / Firefox.

thanks for report, I will investigate it and fix it

I personally use clicky.com and get similar analytics. I guess this is good, but I don't think it justifies the price considering clicky.com gives you in some cases, more information (ip addresses, heatmaps of where users click, time spent, etc.)

but is your site a Ghost blog? If yes, similar analytics but miss special analytics like SEO and content performence I think.

If this tool can identify any visitor, should track them so I doubt about 100% GDPR compliant without opt-in & opt-out.

Thanks for your message!

Somehow clicky.com still is. I can track each mouse movement in real-time and check where they go and come from on my website.

https://clicky.com/help/faq/privacy/gdpr

Two Questions: 1. Do I understand this correctly, it works by inserting a tracking pixel in the html rendered by the blog? 2. Does it have GDPR Compliance? If yes, how?

Hi!

1 - Just pasting a line in your Ghost admin > Code Injection 2 - Yes, basically: don't use cookies, don't get personal data or identify personally each visitor and all IPs are anonym (last octet removed).

Thanks!

It's so annoying that ghost doesn't have basic analytics built in. All I want to know is number of page loads + geo-ip.

Serious question. Why should I pay for this, rather than use Google Analytics?

Yeah Analytics it's free and get a lot of features. Also cookies. But if you are looking for blog-specific analytics (posts, content performance, SEO, posts per month, words per post, best time to post, etc etc), without cookies (forget to add opt-in and opt-out) and 100% GDPR compliant, then you can try for free Ghostboard

Are you using a theme for the app? Looks good.

not sure what do you mean but I'm using bootstrap and custom html+css, thanks!

Good idea!

thanks!

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