Instead of rolling your own look at Piwik. It works very well and is basically a GA clone. I actually like it better than GA in some ways. It's easy to set up and you can run it on your own site so you're not contributing to a global tracking fabric.
We ditched Google Analytics
91–100 of 273 posts
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's not a thing to implement in a few days, but a few weeks. That maybe no option...
If you can reimplement GA in a few weeks, you need to do this over December, then enjoy your FU money. GA is rather deep, with tons of integration and ways to slice and segment data. Yeah, maybe in a few weeks you can get _something_ that'll give you something that'll make some manager not too unhappy. Seems like a terrible value prop for almost all companies since, unfortunately, approximately no one cares (or they…
I mean implementing a analytics tool that does what you need. If you do it just for yourself, you don't need all those fancy things, so it is often doable in a few weeks.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#93I've had good experience with Statcounter (http://www.statcounter.com)
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah, so you are passing some client IDs over the GA after all. An IP address perhaps? You know that's a leading question, right? Incidentally, I ran similar experiment with gaug.es few years ago - pulled on their tracking API from our server side. While it worked as expected, these sort of shenanigans are good for only one thing - hiding the fact that you are using 3rd party analytics from your visitors. On a more gen…
No.
I am not passing IP. I am not passing a client-id. I am not passing any kind of correlation identifier from which a session can be inferred or created. I am not passing user-agent information. I am not passing a cookie ID.
I am only passing a page view event. "Page /foo/bar?bash has been viewed".
Take a look here: https://code.google.com/p/serversidegoogleanalytics/
Tell me where in that example (mine is similar) you see any client identifying information.
There is none. If GA deduces anything, it will be a property of my origin server and not a client.
I do not agree that using GA in the way I have described allows Google to invade privacy at all. Please explain clearly how it does in your opinion.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many. 1. https://piwik.org/
Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well? Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.
Self-hosted means that it will be served from your own servers, and thereby your own domain. So unless your domain is on a block list, it will be loaded.
EDIT: Sorry, I've been dealing with uBlock Matrix for too long, and forgot how advanced the other blockers pattern matching is. See the many responses to this for better information.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#96Not 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 i…
Pricing is falling rapidly for storage. Consider that S3 - IA is $15/mo for a TB, and backblaze B2 can offer 1 TB for $5/mo. I would assume both are making some profit at those price points, so $12/TB/mo should be workable if the service is doing their own hardware.
Backup services especially have low operational requirements for their hardware and network connection, since once the files are uploaded they only need to be verified periodically.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#97It 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…
>> Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion.
Every service does. Pingdom, GA, Olark, Github...
It took them a few weeks to write their own analytics. What features did they not implement? How many people worked on it?
Does your 1 or 2 person startup have 4 weeks to write their own analytics package or do you have more important stuff to do? (I'm betting you do. Like launching your product instead of re-inventing the wheel with analytics)
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
There's a $555 bounty if you can demonstrate a security vulnerability in Piwik because of that.
I'm not interesting in further dehumanizing myself with participation in a bug bounty program.
I'll write an exploit for it (the general case, not just Piwik in particular) and drop it on OSS Sec some day, but here's a theoretical attack:
1. Guess a username somehow. Maybe "admin"? Whatever, we're interested in the security of the hash function. Let's assume we have the username for our target.
2. Calculate a bunch of guess passwords, such that we have one hash output for each possible value for the first N hexits.
e.g.
substr(md5($string), 0, 2) === "00"
substr(md5($string), 0, 2) === "01"
substr(md5($string), 0, 2) === "02"
// ...
substr(md5($string), 0, 2) === "ff"
4. Iterate steps 2 and 3 until you have the first N bytes of the MD5 hash for the password.
5. Use offline methods to generate password guesses against a partial hash.
The end result: A timing attack that consequently allows an optimized offline guess. So even if their entire codebase is immune to SQL injection, you can still launch a semi-blind cracking attempt against them.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#99The other thing is that google analytics is on many adblockers lists, precisely for that reason. As adblockers are getting widespread, the analytics is going blind.
I've been running a blocker to block GA and other junk on my PC, but I imagine I'm in a statistically insignificant minority. And I still can't block them on my iPhone unless I disable JavaScript entirely (though I'm running iOS 9, I'm not able to install a blocker for some reason; I guess Apple arbitrarily doesn't support them on my older iPhone model).
If your device is jailbroken (not sure if there's a jailbreak for iOS 9), you could add entries for GA to its hosts file. I use these on my desktop PC:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#100Not 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 i…
Yup, I've noticed the same with Wuala. The uploads were pretty slow. I've heard similar complaints from people using OneDrive. I would be very willing to switch to a smaller competitor even if it meant paying more than I do at Dropbox. But from my experience Dropbox is the only provider capable of synchronizing large amounts of data 24/7.