You don't need analytics on your blog
blog.yossarian.net
blog.yossarian.net
I really enjoy the light-weight analytics I use for my personal blog. I self-host plausible; it has no cookies or persistent tracking. Just user counts per page, device types, and stuff like that. There are zero valid privacy concerns from this setup.
I get a ton of satisfaction from seeing a spike in traffic to some post and then tracking down the tweet/reddit post/etc. that caused it.
For me, it varies. If my aim is to make an impact around me, then the more traffic there is, the better. However, sometimes just clarifying my own thoughts is a good enough reason for writing. Anything beyond that is a positive side effect.
I've been blogging for a decade and I never bothered with analytics of any kind.
Sure, it is a good feeling if you reach the frontpage of HN, but that's not why I blog. I do it for me, regardless if nobody reads it.
But I'm of the "a blog without comments is not a blog" folks.
Figure if someone wants to reach me there is email, and if someone wants a discussion, they can post the article here or on reddit or whatever...
Comments are so 2003 pre-Trackback/Pingback.
No client side analytics, tracking, or cookies at all!
goaccess generates same/similar dashboards as plausible without having to host/manage any additional self hosted services
This is literally analytics. I didn't read the rest of the post, so if you're arguing against things like GA, fine, I'm with you. But any kind of analytics, even GA, ultimately does the same thing, just with a ton more complexity and additional tracking sources.
FWIW this is what Ive used for a long time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051
(I disagree that this adds any complexity or tracking sources. It's a 70 line script that took me about half an hour to write, and has required no significant changes since I wrote it ~5 years ago.)
In other words, “I don’t need analytics on my blog”? Sure, some people don’t need it, and sure focusing on analytics can have downsides, but why assume or project your assumptions on others? Maybe the slightly dramatic or hyperbolic title is something the author learned by watching analytics or seeing what other popular blog titles do… ;)
For anyone who wants to reach a wider audience, analytics can be great. Speaking from experience trying to write a blog for a startup -- analytics will show you that the things you care about aren’t the things your audience cares about. :) Analytics can help you learn what topics engage your audience. They can also show you how when you go deep and technical on things, hardly anyone reads to the end or engages. But! Sometimes those kinds of posts will have much more staying power in the long run. Personally analytics helped me bring more balance and variety to my posts, and not shun the deep dives necessarily, just avoid overdoing them. That was nice in a way because it made writing easier; I thought I needed to do a long high quality piece every time, and that assumption was wrong.
I don’t know what healthy writing habits are… I suspect my HN commenting habits aren’t super healthy. ;) It’s definitely possible to focus too much on analytics, my point is simply that saying “you” don’t need them at all is perhaps silly. They’re a useful tool, one of many.
You're right that "I don't need analytics on my personal blog" would be a strictly more descriptive title. But I don't write blog posts for titles, I write them for their content, expecting people to actually read the content and contextualize it as necessary. One reasonable form of contextualization would be a value judgment like "actually, I do care about reader numbers" and ignoring the rest of the post's prescriptions.
Having analytics doesn’t change what I write. I still enjoy the information.
and being in public visiting a store vs reading a website in the privacy of your own home are clearly very different situations.
>but that is what is happening regardless
So the justification is "everyone else is doing it" - OK.
Enough going around in circles.
That people know about this type of tracking with stores and do not with websites is not my problem, and at best, they should be educated about that, and indeed we have laws against this exact thing, such as CFAA, and no judge will let you off the hook just because you said it was in cyberspace and not meatspace that you invaded someone else's servers. Therefore, both are analogously the same.
If you care about your writing, then your aim is for people to read your whole post, not just parts of it. And you might think you want to know how much time people spent on your page (i.e. what your bump rate is) but even that tells you nothing: what are you going to do with that information? And that's not rhetorical: do you actually work on your writing based on whether people scroll past the fold? Because if you do, I'd love to hear what your workflow around that is.
Unless you're trying to monetize your readership through ad placements, analytics like these are a little lie we like to tell ourselves matter, when really they don't. They're nice to look at, but eye candy isn't a good enough reason to run tracking and behavioral profiling on a blog.
> And much like profiling any program I’ve written, the hotspot is always something different from what I’d have expected. Having analytics doesn’t change what I write. I still enjoy the information.
I like seeing the hotspot so I know what to focus on in the future. It's really no different than in startups, let's say you build features A, B, and C, but most people are focusing on C, knowing that info ensures you better serve your users. For a blog, your user is your reader. You might say server level analytics might work, but just as in startups, it assumes that there is only one feature (or for blogs, only one idea) per page. Hence, intra-page analytics can be useful.
However, I could only find a need to know which posts are popular and which give 404 errors, nothing else. I'd argue that for big chunk of personal blogs, collecting general geographic and/or traffic sources isn't actually useful nor justified.
I think that it can be hugely motivating to see your essays reaching people. However, as the author pointed out, it can also be demoralizing if the ratings are lower than expected.
With that in mind, I don't think we should stop traffic analysis. The issue seems to lie in our initial expectations. I plan to apply some analytics, but I don't necessarily anticipate high ratings.
Also the author probably isn't advising us to completely discard analytics. He actually provides us with a simplified method for it. I think what he tries to do is to suggesting that we should not obsess over it too much. I agree that if analytics demotivate us from writing, it might be best to completely remove it.
Took a little bit of effort tracking down the tab generating this traffic and now they are banned from my local network forever.
zcat /var/log/nginx/access.log* | goaccess
You don't need your blog either.
But analytics are a fun toy to mess around with, much like your blog is.
Besides logistical reasons, I think there's very little value in refusing to acknowledge that many people find attention to be a useful motivator (even if it isn't the best or right motivator). The point of the post was to communicate that you can track a blog's attention without relying on third-party services or hosting your own heavyweight analytics solution.
This is one of those "if someone wants their IP scrubbed, they can request it, but lol no" situations: for blogs run by regular folks instead of services run by businesses, just pointing to "it's in the GDPR" is not enough. The GDPR gets a LOT of things intentionally wrong so it can go after PII-gathering-so-that-can-be-monetized businesses.