281–290 of 401 posts
On-premise Matomo is free. https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/
note that matomo makes it very hard (impossible?) to automate updates when self-hosted, which is the reason i abandoned them on my personal projects in favor of goatcounter (for the time being until i find a simple, self-hostable option).
The challenge is that there aren't really any good alternatives. The alternatives suggested (Plausible, Fathom, etc.) are fine for hobby projects, blogs, etc. but they don't support any of the modern analytics required for commercial usage. If you're running a business then you need an analytics solution that supports attribution modelling, cohorts, funnels, etc. and there's just no great competitors. (I'd happily in…
This ends with the author promoting his new 'bootstrapped app': https://keepthescore.co/ That website uses Google Analytics!
Well, it looks like they succeeded in their goal which was to funnel traffic to their site. It's now a top post on HN, with a top comment directly linking to their site, and I'm sure it will be shared in other places. This is partly why I'm not sure about blocking ads. I'd rather have ads be ads, and not have to read everything like it's a research paper to know if it's secretly an ad. Aside from personal blogs and f…
I'm coming around to the idea that Google (and Facebook etc) need to be called out and held accountable for the "negative externalities" that come with their business model, the same as if a company was polluting the physical environment. Google has turned much of the internet into a wasteland (there are examples as it related to news in the article but this is true for most content). They don't have to pay for this…
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Apple famously "ignores" its users, partly because users usually can't see far beyond what is in front of them, often because they don't know about impending advances in technology or clever new designs. They'll ask for faster, cheaper versions of what they already have (faster horses, cheaper buggy whips as they say) rather than the next big thing. Faster/cheaper weren't the primary draws of the Mac, iPod, iPhone, i…
It's really not that useful for Apple to collect analytics because they make physical products, where the potential of analytics is limited. When it comes to a SaaS or a web page, the possibilities of analytics are much greater. And yet, Macs will still send usage and performance data to Apple so they can incorporate that information into future product versions and find out about system software issues.
Your SaaS or webpage probably gathers 80% of what Google Analytics does in your log files. It could without doubt provide deeper insights that GA is capable of by adding your own behaviour tracking code (which can be written with the understanding of your specific problem dom ain, rather than be an "everything to everybody" generalised solution).
Nobody is suggesting we shouldn't collect usage and performance data, the thesis here is that we shouldn't send all that directly to the worlds most profitable advertising agency, just because they'll draw us some pretty graphs for free.
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When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking? I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting! I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though…
I used to have GA on my Github documentation. Then I realized how much of it was garbage referer spam that Google wasn't doing anything to combat.
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> Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. For the first decade of my career, I really believed this, and spent a lot of time doing split tests, and studying analytics, and trying to "make things better" by understanding the numbers as they were given to me. This was a mistake. I've since learned that these numbers will rarely help me make meaningful improvements to my product, and my business. Sure, they can…
> but they simply aren't going to show me how to create an ingenious idea that takes things to the next level. Of course not. There's no substitute for straight-up creativity and deep thinking. But once you have your ingenious idea, you still have to design it, make sure it's clear to users, that they find it and can use it effectively. Your "ingenious idea" may turn out to be largely sabotaged if a button you though…
This ends with the author promoting his new 'bootstrapped app': https://keepthescore.co/ That website uses Google Analytics!