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Comment by octref | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously with log parsing you don’t get as much information as a JavaScript-heavy, Google Analytics-style system. There’s no screen sizes, no time-on-page metrics, etc. But that’s okay for me!

This also bypasses Ad blocker. In the case you have a large percentage of technical audience (who presumably would have Ad blocker installed) this log can be way more accurate than GA.

However this still requires setting up the image on a third-party server. I would really love it if GitHub pages or Netlify can provide some simple server-side tracking. It doesn't match GA but in some cases that's all I need.

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> I would really love it if GitHub pages or Netlify can provide some simple server-side tracking. It doesn't match GA but in some cases that's all I need.

That would be a great feature for GitHub Pages! Just a simple interface like https://simpleanalytics.io/simpleanalytics.io would serve most GH Pages use cases, I would think.

I feel like that should already exist, but surprisingly it doesn't. Hopefully Github works on it soon!

They already owned an analytics service for a while but it changed owners recently. Still looks almost the same though https://get.gaug.es/ - so I guess they decided it’s not part of their core business.

>This also bypasses Ad blocker.

Not for me. `/pixel.png?` is blocked by default in uBlock.

welcome.png, hello.png, etc. will work. As will any random combination of letters.

> I would really love it if GitHub pages or Netlify can provide some simple server-side tracking. It doesn't match GA but in some cases that's all I need.

Cloudflare does this for free, and you can run it on top of Netlify, Github/Gitlab pages, etc.

https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/

I don't think Cloudflare's info is very helpful, at least in the free/cheap plans. It can help to roughly identify where your visitors come from and how many visits are from bots but that's about it.

> However this still requires setting up the image on a third-party server.

While this is true, we found a solution to bypass ad blockers (which could be implemented by Google Analytics as well). My experience is that ad blockers only block scripts and pixels that are implemented on multiple websites [1]. With having a custom domain and a non analytics named script or URL, ad blockers are unlikely to block you. At Simple Analytics we created a feature for this where customers can point a CNAME to our server [2]. We setup SSL and proxy all requests to our server. This makes it almost impossible for ad blockers to block the stats of those customers.

[1] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/1855

[2] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers

> This also bypasses Ad blocker

GA does a good job at extrapolating your data to account for users with ad block. Obviously not perfect, but good enough for most cases.

How is this presented in the UI? I have never noticed this extrapolation.

That's because extrapolation does not exist. He may be confused with sampling.

A proposition of what might have been true doesn't really have a place in analytics.

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