Show HN: Analytics.js for Node | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Analytics.js for Node

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66 pointsivolo12 comments

Shouldn't the package be called "segment.io"? I'd hate to see every startup with an API trying to grab generic names on package repositories.

That said, it looks like someone else beat you to getting "analytics" for a README.

Perhaps you could make it so segment.io isn't the only option, or merge a pull request that does this, and ask SlexAxton to release the name, as suggested by izs? https://npmjs.org/doc/disputes.html

Edit: also npm is increasingly being used for browser packages. I'm not sure what to do when a browser and server component share the same name.

> npm is increasingly being used for browser packages.

What is a browser package?

If you mean something that's intended to be fed through browserify, it should start with browserify- or end with -browserify

If you mean something like bower or component, which one should be standardized? Hell, both use the same component.json file but they do so in completely different ways

Browserify has a fairly generic format, and some projects are trying to piggyback off of browserify. Also browserify is long and people like to keep package names short. That does simplify things, though...

With upcoming replacement for ga.js (tracker for Google Analytics) is called analytics.js as well, this confusion is about to get messier.

+1, give up on analytics.js and pick a brand name for the script. It's a good idea, seems well implemented and supported -- we will use it! You're obviously interested in marketing, and using the name analytics.js over segmentio.js seems to serve solely as a thin veil over SEO blog posts. Funny thing is, we like your script and we'll upvote you either way. Change the name!

Module name is slightly misleading... surely segment-client, node-segment or anything else would have been more appropriate. It's not really THE analytics library, or really an analytics library at all for nodejs.

My favorite is the utterly useless `math` library: https://github.com/kaleb/js-math

Kaleb is my hero.

I'm not sure I get it... analytics for server side?

(segment.io co-founder here) - you integrate with one analytics API on the server-side - those events are sent to segment.io servers. you then pick your favorite analytics services (mixpanel, kissmetrics, etc) and we'll transform and route your server-side events there without you having to write and push new analytics code.

Does it keep intact original request host names and such, or do all requests appear to come from your servers? Also what about mixpanels user stream functionality - would this break stuff like that? I can see the value prop and usefulness of this, but it is just another fee on top of a fee, in a way.

server-side events are best used in conjunction with the client-side libraries (via analytics.js). For example, you can use analytics.js to load the GoSquared javascript library to keep track of referrers / concurrents on the page, etc. Then you can turn on Mixpanel to keep track of events that happen server-side, such as "Payment Processed", etc ..

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