Roll Your Own Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#41

Post by troymcclure » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

pcmaffey wrote: post #21

kotrunga wrote: post #18

I like the idea.... but this doesn't make sense. I'm all for not using Google Analytics- I don't use it on my site. But why would you then use Google Sheets to hold the info? That's ridiculous. That's like telling people how to make an apple pie without sugar, and the last step before baking is dumping in a pound of sugar! If you want an easy data store, use something like SQLite. There are plenty of options that are…

For sure, there are a bunch of reasons not to use Google Sheets. For this, it's just an easy, free, and temp way to get a new site up without needing to setup a backend. It's not really a hard requirement for me to get off Google though, just to avoid using their ad-tech. For privacy concerns, using Google Sheets isn't all that different from using MySQL on Google Cloud, etc.

When looking at solutions, did you consider using a private git repo?

On that thought, you could potentially hook it up to Google Sheets or editors that integrate with remote git repos. Skipping 3rd party hosts, you could host your own git server for cheap too.

Awesome project nonetheless! I'm a hypocrite still using GA but want to move off of it this year, so reading your solution has me thinking about my own.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#42

Post by zubspace » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

There's also GoAccess [1] which can monitor and parse your nginx or apache logs to show you realtime stats in a html report or even directly in your terminal. The numbers do not fully match google analytics numbers, but I love how it looks.

[1] https://goaccess.io/

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#43

Post by cyrusmg » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

pcmaffey wrote: post #36

cyrusmg wrote: post #25

I wish pages like this one had RSS feed. I would like to follow future articles, but I do not want it to end up in my email inbox.

Ok here it is: https://www.pcmaffey.com/rss.xml thanks for the tip

Cheers, that was quick!

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#44

Post by r3bl » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

folkrav wrote: post #26

fbelzile wrote: post #24

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/ I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Also mentioned in the article: > Avoid ad-blockers - My goal with analytics is to learn how people use my site so I can improve it and serve them better. I'm not using ad-tech so there's there's no point in getting blocked by 25% of visitors with an ad-blocker. That means doing 1st-party analytics, without using a 3rd-party tracking snippet—even self-hosted!* > *Some ad-blockers already block self-hosted Matamo/Piwik…

Specifically, it's the EasyPrivacy list that blocks it. That list is one of the default ones in uBlock Origin.

The beauty of Matomo is that you can configure it to read the data from the server logs. No need for me to bother with adblockers, tracking scripts, and how it all affects my website performance.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#45

Post by pavel_tiunov » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

lukethomas wrote: post #34

At the past 3 places I've worked, we've setup Snowplow Analytics ( https://snowplowanalytics.com/ ) and would strongly recommend it over GA, Segment, and other third-party systems. If you're looking for a first-party system, Snowplow is an amazing setup.

Showplow is great and cost effective. AWS Cloudfront, Lambda and Athena make it possible to create fully serverless setup on top of it. There's an open source example of such setup: https://statsbotco.github.io/cubejs/event-analytics/

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#46

Post by avolcano » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

I did something similar a couple years ago for a game, where I simply wanted to track active player count over time: https://devlog.disco.zone/2016/09/02/google-sheets-analytics...

Roll-your-own is really nice when you have small data and when you have simple numbers to query (such as "get number of active players").

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#47

Post by smacktoward » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

tasubotadas wrote: post #40

fbelzile wrote: post #24

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/ I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

>and only takes a few minutes to setup. The usual trap. That's why we have managed DBs.

Matomo offers a hosted version of their product as well.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#48

Post by soared » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

This is like a marketer suggesting an engineer roll his own security.

If its a fun side project, do it! If you actually want it to work, don't do it. If you want to /really/ use it (checking more than sessions), don't do it.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#49

Post by soared » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #12

nickjj wrote: post #7

Your site has no visible scroll bar. What was your design reason for hiding it? It's probably one of the most useful controls to use on a site. You should track its usage with your own analytics. Or for now, track how many people moved their mouse to where they expected to see and use a scroll bar, noticed there was none and then closed the page.

>You should track its usage with your own analytics. I appreciate the joke, but don't give them ideas. Since one can't normally track interactions with the scrollbar, I wouldn't be surprised if they were to implement their own "scrollbar" from DIVs to be able to track if the user had dragged it. Just put back the built-in scrollbar. Period.

You don't track the scrollbar itself, just scroll depth by quartile

https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/scroll-depth-trigger-goo...

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#50

Post by mxuribe » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

This is quite timely! I'm in the middle of transitioning away from google analytics for my apps/sites (to de-google-ify as much as possible). However, my plan was to implement self-hosted matomo/piwik. In fact, i was considering only implementing the server log-reading feature (and not the javascript tracker script) primarily to lessen webpage bloat but also because my analytics needs are quite basic and minimal. (I'd like to say that i'm some awesome digital marketer, and "need all the data things", but honestly, i really can't justify all that for my small apps/sites. ;-)

That being said, i do love seeing "roll your own" examples - which help foster creativity, remind us that the big silos are not the only ones that can actually produce helpful utilities and platforms, and to further de-centralize stuff on the web (indieweb baby!) Kudos @pcmaffey!