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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.

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> Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.

You can't be serious. Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"?

This might have been the case in 1995 when there were only a few websites around, and Internet use was considered leisure time and not part and parcel of everyday life.

> Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"?

I do. Maybe you should, too?

For what it's worth I find it minorly annoying when people send me emails about my posts. I'm happy for people to comment on them, but typically an email is an invitation to have a private discussion and I'd much rather talk publicly (https://www.jefftk.com/p/comment-dont-message)

And on the flip side, there are people like Noam Chomsky who reply to all emails they receive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/6a23eg/how_long_do...

You may get more comments/emails than I do. I think I've gotten 3 worthwhile comments and 2 emails in the 8 years my blog has been active. I actually turned comments off, because I was getting thousands of spam daily, and that seems like a waste of everyone's time.

I host my comments externally. For example, https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh is currently on the HN frontpage as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589, and I think of that like my comment section. I have my blog pull in the comments from there: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh#hn-22811119

I also pull comments from LessWrong and Facebook, though the FB comment integration is pretty temperamental.

Is there a way to comment on your post if it's not been posted to Hacker News/Facebook/LessWrong?

I post everything to FB and LW. If you want to comment on HN and you think it's a post that's relevant here you could submit it?

I don't submit things to Hacker News :(

I think comments are probably easier to interact with, but they're more hassle to set up and maintain :( FWIW, I often take interesting points from emails I get and add them as "updates" to blog posts.

A fair number of people, surprisingly. Some will also send emails with questions or comments.

My blog only has a few hundred hits, and I haven't put my email address on it or invited anyone to contact me, but I've still gotten emails from two people and had some pleasant conversations.

Hah, speak for yourself. These aren't as uncommon as you think.

Or just do it the old fashioned way - have the server keep an access log, then use something like GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/) to produce reports from it. It’s not real-time reporting, but then you probably don’t need real-time reporting for your personal site anyway.

Alas, I don’t control my server, but if I did I would say you might not even need this. If you’re using Google Analytics right now it’s probably better than that, though.

I too don't controll my server, but it turned out that my hosting provider (one.com) has pretty nice access analytics, e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶j̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶.̶c̶o̶m̶'̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶D̶N̶S̶ ̶r̶e̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶V̶P̶S̶ (Edit:Nope it does not, how could it). When I discovered this I dropped GA for most of my projects. I have one remaining project that still uses GA but only bcs I haven't gotten around to fix it. Maybe your hosting provider has analytics too? I had to poke around in the dashboard for one.com to find it.

I use GitHub Pages.

It is 100% real-time. https://rt.goaccess.io/

Oh cool, I didn’t realize GoAccess could do that! Thanks!

If you want high quality blog posts, you need to know which ones are popular and bring in new readers.

Without that, you'll loose a really strong signal for self improvement, and your blog might become write-only...

I don't see anything in what you said that explains the assumption that a popular post is a high-quality post.

Certainly if you're looking to build an audience, then the popularity of your posts is an important metric that will help you craft additional popular posts.

But it seems to me that the the only _quality_ indicator isn't a metric at all - it's actual feedback from people who have read what you've written.

I doesn't really matter. The metric is popularity. Period.

You can delve into metrics like the time spent on a page but in the long run popularity is the king since it also reflects dwell time.

I honestly couldn’t care less which of my blog posts are popular. I write about things interesting to me, which I assume is often too boring or technical for most people. Sometimes people post my stuff to Hacker News and it does well, sometimes it doesn’t, but if I tried to “optimize” this by matching what the site seems to like I wouldn’t write some of my favorite posts.

You are right, you don't need to know it in a small blog or site

But metrics and statistics are the very foundation of science, and the graal of software engineering. I can't resist the temptation of knowing which browsers and the countries of the users of my website, or how many hacker news visitors come to it every other season, so many possibilities... sigh

You really don’t need to know that. I mean, it’s often (but not always: see the perils of optimizing for “clicks”) nice if you could, but you are actively trading the privacy of your visitors for that information.

And you can determine all that from regular web-server logs.

No need to snitch on your visitors to big G.

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