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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

51–60 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#51
Spideroak user here. I stopped using Dropbox and started using Spideroak about a 18 months ago. I really like the product. It's not as good as Dropbox in some ways (like automatically syncing photos from my phone) but it really is easy to use. I still have a mobile client on Android and I can keep my files in sync across multiple computers. I pay for the larger storage size and I'm not even close to using it all.

It syncs fast too. Just thought I'd share my experience with people.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#52
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read my comment? You will have no GA cookie from any of my sites, I am not recording client identifying things or capabilities. It is a server-side push of GA and avoids all client-side interactions. It is merely, "A page has been viewed, this one: /foo/bar?bash". There's nothing in there that is tracking you. I'm not even embracing the session management aspect. I get to use the tool that is best-in-class, i…

Without any "client identifying things" how would GA be able to chain several page hits into a session then? That is, do basic visits vs. hits split. If you are in fact anonymizing everything about a client as you claim you do, then it won't be able to. Unless, of course, you are feeding GA some opaque client ID that you then internally map to and from actual clients that hit your server. However something tells me t…

In the test I've done, sending no session/user data over, I lose all sense of a "session".

But I do retain insight into what content has been viewed, how much, what is rising and falling, etc.

The question really is what info are you really reporting on? AdBlockers make us blind and tracking is horrible, but I get to have a far more complete view over the simple stuff Urchin used to be great at.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#53
post #33

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many. 1. https://piwik.org/

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#54

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

Looking for a good npm / express middleware module that does this. Combines privacy concerns + developer laziness!

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#55
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't care about the cookie or any of the details of the implementation. They care about being tracked across the whole internet. If you are still contributing to that then you are disrespecting your customers. I hope that I am not one of them.

Did you read my comment? You will have no GA cookie from any of my sites, I am not recording client identifying things or capabilities. It is a server-side push of GA and avoids all client-side interactions. It is merely, "A page has been viewed, this one: /foo/bar?bash". There's nothing in there that is tracking you. I'm not even embracing the session management aspect. I get to use the tool that is best-in-class, i…

The only issue I can see with this is a lot of HTTPS connections with your analytics platform from your web service. If you choose to use a work queue/proxy to do it, it's additional work/point of failure, etc.. It's not as 'simple' as adding a JS at the bottom of your page.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would they stop themselves from being listed on Google? A right to be forgotten request? Their decision was to ditch Google Analytics, not to disappear from the web.

Robots.txt. I think it's interesting that you say that removing yourself from Google is the same as "disappearing from the web" implying that the web is Google. It's not. Perhaps they should use alternative forms of outreach, something I am considering with my company.

Google is not the web, you are correct; but for all intents and purposes, it's the web's phonebook. You remove yourself from the phonebook, you make it very difficult for people to find you, or your business.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#57

An open-source, self-hostable solution providing 80% of common Google Analytics functionality seems doable to me. Is there anything out there in this realm? If not, why not?

Have a look at piwik: http://piwik.org/

I don't recommend Piwik. Using MD5 for passwords in 2015 is beyond irresponsible.

https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/7f375924db9328f20a0b7cb1...

https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/6846145992278b52a2a35a8f...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#58

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

And GA is inscrutable. I don't use it very much because it's got way too many layers of abstraction. It was fine before as Urchin. Maybe this is a category like email clients — there should be a sustainable paid product that doesn't suck.

Maybe http://haveamint.com/ is what you're looking for? (I'm not affiliated--just a former user.)

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#59

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

If all you want to know is who accessed a site, with which browser, how long for, and which pages they looked at then you could get all that from your webserver's log files without writing any code. On the other hand, to build something that's robust, relatively scalable, works across browsers and devices, and can give you an event watching platform like GAnalytics gives you (eg the useful bit), that is far from trivial.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#60
post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed).

I wonder if that is happening in this specific case? Although if it were the case the vendor should still be honest about it. Just saying they limit uploads to 2 Mbps is better than giving the run-around.

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