Google Analytics for GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Google Analytics for GitHub

github.com

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ouch, GitHub has just announced Traffic Analytics

https://github.com/blog/1672-introducing-github-traffic-anal...

If by ouch, you mean AWESOME. Then I'm totally with you! Wohoo!

ouch because it makes this submission obsolete in a record 9 hours.

Agreed on the actual feature :-)

As a founder of another service, http://bitdeli.com, that provides analytics for GitHub, I would be curious to hear what kind of analytics would you like to get for your repos?

There are a number of GitHub-specific metrics that we could add, like being able to track the number of forks / stars.

We will be adding weekly email reports soon - what metrics would you like to see included?

Can everyone please just stop using google analytics

Webserver logs give you all the information you should want about how users look at your page, and don't violate your users' privacy by notifying a third-party advertising company about their browsing habits.

I don't think github gives users access to the logs. Also, Google Analytics provides a more convenient way of looking through the data, more information, and alerts. It also lets you view the data for multiple sites at once.

Github could provide their users access to those logs.

And if convenient log analyzers do not exist in 2014, that sounds like a great project to put on.... Github.

I've heard good things about self-hosted, open source Piwik: http://piwik.org/

Google Analytics and the rest do more than just log web traffic details. They also offer event tracking and real-time stats, with a decent UI, so that your marketing director or boss can easily jump in and check things out.

I realize there are similar offerings that don't require a third party but I don't see them as equal alternatives.

Server logs display requests that reach the server. This has the potential to become problematic if you have an intermediary proxy of some sort (CDN, cache, SaaS based proxy) which you may or may not get access logs from. GA, or any java-script based snippet, has the potential to be more accurate in that sense.

This is a cool hack taking advantage of Measurement Protocol, however please note that only the page with a rendered readme.md can work

e.g. this page won't work

https://github.com/igrigorik/ga-beacon/tree/master/static

Add a readme to that dir and it will.

GitHub should just offer to buy this project, and integrate Analytics natively.

It would make sense for them to integrate Gauges[0], but either would be fine. Bitdeli's[1] another image-bug solution.

[0]: http://get.gaug.es/ [1]: https://bitdeli.com/

GitHub recent sold Gauges to someone else.

Or, it could buy nothing at all and just install GA natively.

GA allows to use two trackers, so any page could be set up with their ID and the project's owner's.

GA is available on GitHub pages, there's an input for the ID in the settings. GitHub doesn't use GA, so there's also no need to implement two trackers, having an input for a GA ID in the repository settings would be enough.

Personally, I don't think Analytics is a good measurement of a project on GitHub, I would be more inclined to look at the number of clones, forks, downloads from the releases page, pull requests, and the number of commits being made.

Plus I'm not sure many GitHub users will appreciate the mild security leak.

GitHub made better repo analytics available yesterday, and is basically exactly what you described: https://github.com/blog/1672-introducing-github-traffic-anal...

Why buy this project? It's very simple in nature and licensed under The MIT License.

> offer to buy this project, and integrate Analytics natively

Buy this project so every project page can embed 2 lines of javascript for Google Analytics?

No need to buy anything, it's an MIT-licensed project, and a trivial implementation under the hood to boot. If I wasn't learning Go while writing it, I think it would take all of 5-10 minutes to replicate (including deploying to prod)... :-)

What I wish GitHub would do is allow us to specify our own GA profile in project settings and just add an extra two lines of JavaScript in their pages to beacon the right metrics directly to GA. They're already using GA on their pages, so adding an additional profile is trivial. [1]

A proper GA integration would eliminate the need to proxy requests, and give us (repo owners) more metrics: I'm most interested in referral information - aka, how are people finding my repo. Also, it would enable analytics on all pages (e.g. source files, etc).

If anyone from GH is reading this... Please? :-)

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

We'll see what we can do. ;)

You guys are awesome. Kudos!

GitHub just announced built in analytics today: https://github.com/blog/1672-introducing-github-traffic-anal...

This is great! I've started using this.

Since this is being hosted on appspot and you'd be proxying significant traffic - I think you would cross your limits soon.

Alternatives: http://bitdeli.com/ and http://githalytics.com/

Really a shame Github doesn't allow simple inclusion of a Google Analytics tag.

Maybe not the tag itself but a Google Analytics UA code.

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