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Ask HN: Ethical analytics for blog?

9 points by raihansaputra ↗ HN
I just moved my blog to a Jekyll + Netlify stack from hosted Wordpress. Is there any simple analytics option for me? I don't want to use Google Analytics (as I block it myself). I don't want anything complicated, just visit count for each page and (if possible) unique visitors for each day.

9 comments

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huhtenberg
Don't you want to know the sources of the traffic too?
raihansaputra
If that's possible; but just limited to referrals. IP collection to determine origin is not my concern.
jerriep
This is something I really wish Netlify will provide out of the box. Since they are serving the content, they should be able to provide at least some basic server-side analytics. I am also just interested in basic stats like you.

I have pinged them about this, but at the time this was not something they were planning to add soon.

raihansaputra
I even prefer server-side analytics, but if it's their stance for now, I guess we have to wait until they roll it out.
taf2
Use evercookie and fingerprinting. It’s super important to track everything. Ask for camera permission and try to capture audio and video - understanding peoples facial expressions while reading is very important for measuring clickbait title performance and determine the perfect place in your article to display a pop up to get their email. Also with all the extra data you can find people to sell the data to that should help you continue to provide your blog content for free.

In a more serious note, maybe use server side log analysis tool like https://goaccess.io - it’s pretty easy to setup and I think it does just what you need.