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Comment by NetOpWibby | Hacker News Reader

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NetOpWibby·

Hell yeah! Just subscribed.

I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.

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Maybe a dumb question but why?

Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ

It is kind of fun even if it serves no purpose. Like those end of year recaps by various services, "oh shit I played that much Hades?"

There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.

Same reason why people have personal projects and share them on GitHub, it's fun to see people using / starring / interacting with your project / blog.

Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.

If you want to count every search engine bot, AI crawler, vulnerability scanner as users then that works, but these days it's basically useless to use these web server logs.

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