What can you learn by writing as a developer | Hacker News Reader

What can you learn by writing as a developer

blog.phuaxueyong.com

45 pointsxueyongg8 comments

I share the feeling that writing as a SE gives you a better perspective of the things you learn. I'm also liking that the old web with the personal blogs is coming back :D

Do you track the visits to your website somehow? I'm trying to avoid Google Analytics, but other simpler options look to be expensive.

I do track visits to my blog and I keep half an eye on Google Search console to see the performance in the Google index.

Since I use WordPress, I have Jetpack which comes with rudimentary statistics. I've set up Matomo recently as a experiment. I'm still evaluating if it's worth my while.

A more fundamental question is this: To what end are you writing? Are you writing to gain a better perspective yourself? Do you want to inform, show, teach, entertain a larger audience? Do you balance towards one or the other? Or is it a bit of both? Those questions are important as they inform your writing style, topics and what you want to get out publicly writing in the first place.

Ever since the classic "visitor counter" on a website, visitor tracking has it's benefits and pitfalls. Like unwittingly narrowing your focus to simply chasing an ever higher number of visitors, rather then just getting the satisfaction of having written a piece and learning something while you did it.

A far better indicator would be people reaching out to you about your work and what you've written. I think that says far more then just a statistic.

There is nothing wrong with returning to old school analytics as well. Your HTTP server has web logs, and tools exist to parse them into nice charts and graphs. I used AWStats back in the day. I'm sure there are others as well.

If you are using an nginx, GoAccess[0] is the best utility to parse the log file.

[0] https://goaccess.io/

Matomo is a great alternative, but you either have to pay to host it on their servers, or host in on your own server. You could setup a $5 droplet on Digital Ocean and host it easily enough.

Yea i do track them apparently! GA do have really robust features that i'm not sure if there's any other competitors whom are close. Do any one else have other recommendations? (:

If you used WordPress, you could use Koko Analytics. https://www.kokoanalytics.com/

Outside WordPress however.... it's too much hassle to setup analytics other than Google Analytics.

please - get rid of the pop up.

the content I care about is your blog post. why do i have to dismiss a pop up to get to it?

that pop up was enough friction that I did not read your blog post. I navigated away.

cheers.

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