I have my personal blog, made with Hugo and hosted on GitHub pages. Initially I did not turn on any kind of web tracking / web analytics, because I do not like tracking at all. But I want to make my blog better and to achieve it, I need a feedback loop about traffic. For example, what are the most popular publications, or how many people view my blog from mobile devices, etc.
So, my question is, what is the most appropriate (ot the less evil) way to track a web traffic?
An answer “there is no good way to do it without breaking user’s privacy” is acceptable too, I did not decide yet turning on the analytics. Instead I’m interested in an opinion of the community.
Thanks in advance!
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The folks who’re recommending analysis of your site’s access logs are correct. However, Github Pages doesn’t have any such notion. You might have to go with the recommendations of moving stuff over to a VPS.
It is always a tradeoff. It could be cool to see some analytics of visits, but I’m not ready to go self hosted for that. My blog is just a hobby, not a work, no monetization, etc.
Checkout goaccess. No additional tracking needed, it just reads your server logs. https://goaccess.io/
https://plausible.io
I was using plausible for one of my projects and had a good experience.
Awstats
awstats parses logfiles to create statistics, which op probably has not due to the page beeing hosted on github
Yeah my point is you gotta self host to collect analytics without violating your visitor’s privacy.
Think of it like people walking into a brick and mortar retail store and what they should be able to expect from an honest local business. For most of us, the sensitivities are when your “local store” is collecting data that is used for biased information, price fixing, and manipulation. I don’t think you’ll find anyone here that boycotts a store because they keep a count of how many customers walk in the front door.
I use umami for my pages
This one? https://umami.is/
Yup
The right way to do this is to self-host your analytics.
I don’t know which tools are popular for this nowadays, but something like Matomo On-Premise might be worth a look. I expect you can find more with a web search. Keywords: open-source self-hosted web analytics.
Interesting, thanks! I didn’t think about it. But for a personal blog (without any kind of monetization) it is not an option, unfortunately, due to hosting/infra prices 😞
VPS can be had very cheap: https://lowendstock.com/
Also, it might be worth looking for analytics software that can get its data from web server log files. I have done that with Apache and Nginx in the past. These days, I wouldn’t be surprised if such software can ingest the log files created by Amazon’s S3 free tier. You wouldn’t have to manage a VPS with that approach.
Of course, if you’re letting a major data collector like Github (Microsoft), Amazon, or Cloudflare serve your site, it’s not particularly good for privacy to begin with.
I think Matomo is the popular ethical Google analytics alternative IIRC
How are you on self hosting something? You could give a couple of these a try. Data stays with you so you get to decide how much to track.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#analytics
I use Ackee, it’s awesome!
https://ackee.electerious.com/
“Self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. Ackee runs on your own server, analyzes the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface.”
Tracking how many users you have and how many of them visit an article is hardly any breach of privacy compared to what ad companies retain.
Use an open source solution about analytics and minimise data collection if not absolutely necessary.