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Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.
Out of curiosity, what are the options for log parsing? The ones I know are Awstats and Webalizer. Is there any more up to date or more modern alternative to these two?
If this tool could also show you anonymized aggregates of click trails through your site, I'd be down in a heartbeat. Raw visitor counts and some metrics on where they came from are sometimes useful, but for a web app the much more useful info comes from the pathways people take through the app.
If this tool could also show you anonymized aggregates of click trails through your site, I'd be down in a heartbeat. Raw visitor counts and some metrics on where they came from are sometimes useful, but for a web app the much more useful info comes from the pathways people take through the app.
Yup, that's definitely a goal, just need to build it. Check back in a few months :-)
Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.
There’s 100x more bots that don’t run JS than do, so the presence of a running JS environment is a helpful filter. User agent is not a good substitute.
We host websites and the bots are super annoying, because even the well-behaved ones throttle requests per domain, which means they just hit all of our customers at once. If our cache architecture were a little more rotten, like I’ve seen on other jobs, then bot-driven evictions would get ugly, instead of just spiking our traffic, increasing our overhead, and making it harder to get clear metrics.
Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.
The most obvious one I miss (I don't currently only use server-side analytics) is something like screen size. You can do user-agent sniffing to _guess_ what the size of a mobile device is, but it doesn't tell you whether or not you can stop wasting time making your content responsive on a tiny screen that no-one uses anymore.
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> Analytics in general does nothing to help the users of your site I find this really interesting, and am amazed that more sites and services don't surface some of their analytics data to users. Look at the success of yearly "wrap up" campaigns (disclosure: I work for a company with one of the most famous versions of that mechanic, but don't work on it). You'll get users opting into some data and tracking if there's…
I like seeing general analytics about a site because I am nosy so I enjoy seeing "This blog post was visited 300 times" type information. But I would hate to start seeing "You, personally, have visited this site 14 times" start cropping up because it would remind me how much information on me is available. Intellectually I know this data exists in Google Analytics, but actually seeing it would creep me out.
I applaud anyone one makes an effort to avoid thirdparty analytics products. Analytics in general does nothing to help the users of your site while pushing additional work onto the client and leaking information. But looking at data is fun so I ended up creating my own super light counter that I run on my site so I can see hits. My goal was to store as little information as possible - only hit counts as stored, and n…
> Analytics in general does nothing to help the users of your site while pushing additional work onto the client and leaking information. Analytics are a very useful tool to use in order to improve a product.
Thank you for making this
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It's not that surprising that someone hasn't come up with a product as comprehensive, and most importantly "free". That's a lot of infrastructure.
No need for it to be free. I'd be willing to pay to not blow my brains out every time I have to touch GA.
I should have waited a few more months before coding my own statistics tool (KISSS [1]) (which is also mentioned in GoatCounter's rationale document [2]). :D GoatCounter seems really promising, I especially like the simple web interface, the selected programming language (Go) and that it should work with a simple SQLite database. Keep up the great work! If you need some ideas for features that are currently implement…