Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

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> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.

I mean, I'm not making the argument that analytics are useless, but this seems like the worst possible example. You can do this trivially with a script to analyze your server (e.g. Apache) logs. And you don't need "a VPS with 1 GB of RAM" for that - which is four times the RAM of the VPS my personal website has run on for the last half decade.

This approach also uses no client-side javascript to collect data, so you wouldn't have to alarm users with potential privacy threats, because nothing is stored other than what's in the HTTP headers.

For a lot or maybe even most people, all of that entails some mix of: possibly having to set up server logs in the first place, redirecting them somewhere for analysis and possibly archival, having access to a server in the first place, hooking up the analytics apparatus to consume the logs yet also be able to serve a dashboard, setup yet another moving part, finally get around to that "TODO: setup real logging instead of println()" issue, etc.

There's lots of take for granted there. It's no wonder copy and pasting a <script> one-liner caught on.

There may actually quite a lot of PII in the HTTP headers: IP address, Accept-Language, and User-Agent being the most obvious (especially mobile browsers often send a ridiculous amount of PII in the User-Agent header).

There's also some very useful information that's hard to get from HTTP headers, screen size being the most obvious one.

I don't think it's fundamentally more privacy-friendly. The real problem with JavaScript trackers from GA and ad networks is that they'll try to profile you with tricks like font metrics, audio API, set cross-domain cookies, and whatnot. But that doesn't apply to either Plausible or GoatCounter (and in the case of GoatCounter, the count.js script is intentionally unminified so it's very easy to see what exactly it does if you care to do so).

GoatCounter runs fine on constrained environments; it has a RES memory size of about 30M, and for the first few months goatcounter.com ran on a $5/month VPS which was mostly just sitting idle.

My blog is hosted on GitHub pages, so I have no direct access to server logs.

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