Netlify Analytics
netlify.com
netlify.com
I'm hesitant to generalize past myself, but I really wish someone made me learn the basics on a web server in my own home, where I could reboot it by pulling out a power cord, and transfer files with a usb stick. I would have been so much more able to make thought out trade-offs or attempt grander things.
Its straight-forward and free (at the margin) to throw up a password protected site on a server, but daunting in SaaS world. Same story for having a bash script update some page with a gnuplot chart with data obtained via curl/wget, vs. CORS and an API, and a charting library, and json ...
I shudder to think of how much time I wasted as I was just learning web anything on solutions that were way too big and complex for my goals at the time - from docker, to lambdas, AWS orbit based nuclear powered whatever to run a clock widget or whatnot. I'm certainly glad I learned those things, and they are scalable and safer and all those good things, but hard to put into context without knowing how one stupid server doing it all by itself would do it.
This is all a drawn out way of saying that the cheapest lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you really should. If anything when you do move to netlify, you will really appreciate it on a different level.
Probably most people’s time in maintenance and development is worth more than $9/month, that’s why these services exist.
Semi-related xkcd https://xkcd.com/1319/
Can you expand what Netlify features you're talking about or provide any guides/links that would steer a newbie in the right direction? I appreciate the "back to basics" attitude, but don't know where to even get started...
Poor Man's Netlify identity - Apache or nginx password rules.
Poor Man's Netlify Large Media Management - Upload some files over sftp.
Poor Man's Netlify Lambda functions - crontab -e, 0 * * * * LynxDumpWeatherToHomepage.sh.
Poor Man's Netlify Teams - Create a new user with access to that site.
Poor Man's Netlify Forms - A php form.
Poor Man's Netlify Analytics - Less +F (or tail -f) web.log file.
^^ This is isn't tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. SanchoPanda doesn't offer tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. Please consult your tax, legal, or sysadmin advisor before making any tax, legal, or web infrastructure related decisions.
Do note that I'm not encouraging people to use CGI for their serverless needs whatsoever but if we're going back to basic then CGI is the closest thing I can think of for serverless.
Unfortunately this costs $108/year more than GA. And while there are a couple of GA alternatives out there, having the financial backing of someone like Netlify makes a big difference. I don't want to think about analytics, I just want to know roughly how much traffic my site is getting, not having to worry about an open source project dying in the next year and having to find yet another replacement.
I also stream all logs into text files so I can process them later too.
[0]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
^I wrote about it here: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics
Yes, it costs money. But this is exactly what I want, and Netlify now has a significant incentive not to do anything shady with the data (and by not using cookies or JavaScript, they hamstring any potential ability to sell the data anyway).
Good work, I'm glad to be a Netlify customer.
If you need the SPA framework for productivity reasons, then you could use something like Gridsome to have it generate a static site.
Clicky, a freemium alternative to Google Analytics costs $10 per month for their Pro plan but that includes 10 websites.
Or Clicky's Pro Platinum plan costs $20 per month for 30 websites.
Kind of wish Netlify had gone with similar pricing
Currently using ticksel.com
I really like the idea of the CDN provider offering this as a service that requires no effort and provides a nice interactive dashboard.
The pricing on this is unfortunately too much for me to justify using it for my personal site, but I'd happily use it for anything more substantive.
Total aside, but I really love the feel of your site. Very polished and I love the way the tool is presented (not to mention that it seems like a useful service to boot!).
Very curious how they are able to do this
https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/#how-it-works
> Because site activity is tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information, [...]
Maybe they hash the IP address. But hashing personal data does not guarantee truly anonymisation. This ressource have more details on the topic: https://cnpd.public.lu/content/dam/cnpd/fr/publications/grou...
Pricing is a bit high for my super-low-traffic hobby sites, unfortunately. But I'm glad they're doing this!
I think that hits the nail on the head. For most usages of GA the product they are selling is pretty graphs that management are convinced they need, any actual actionable insight they can give is secondary to that and I'd bet used but a small fraction of GA users.
“The Pageviews and Top pages charts include only responses with Content-Type: text/html and a status code of 200, 201, or 304. We filter the data by status code this way so that we don’t count errors or double count redirects. This also applies to the Pageviews total for your site. Unique visitors counts different IP addresses engaging with your site within a single day. If someone loads pages of your site on multiple different days, they will be counted as a unique visitor for each day. The Unique visitors total for your site is a sum of the daily numbers.”
To be fair, back in the day when you had a single web server, analytics was easy. I to miss the days of being able to do a 'tail -f web.log' and watch as your page hit Slashdot...
And then fall over?
I miss the days of The Slashdot Effect[1]. Now it's the JS that makes my PC fall over.
[1] Come to think of it The Slashdot Effect would have been a good band name back in the '90s.