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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

61–70 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#61
post #26

The 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).

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#62
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/

Piwik is incredible. But it should be noted that it does provide a scaling challenge for high traffic use cases (> hundred million actions per month), and hosting your own analytics is expensive.

I bring this up because people had been slamming moot for using GA on 4chan instead of piwik without understanding why.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#63

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…

> thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Frankly most of what i read out of the tech world these days seems to be about pandering to developer laziness. All manner of APIs and services seem to exist in their current form simply to extract rent from developers that don't want to do back end "dirty work".

Being paid for doing work by those who need the work done is the opposite of "extracting rent".

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#64
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/

Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well?

Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#65
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…

I was going to post a comment about how cloud storage is more of a means to move data around rather than back it up, until I dug a little deeper and saw that SpiderOak actually pitches itself primarily as a backup provider. I agree, it needs to be much faster than that.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#66
post #20

I'm doing my part. I'm moving to DuckDuckGo for searching more and more. It's a process. Google does have better results. For work I still rely on Google, for private stuff I use https://duckduckgo.com/ And for the sake of ducks, I'm eating less meat as well. No more chicken - too much antibiotics, and as little meat as possible, only when it's worth it, so great taste and good quality.

I'm a big DDG fan too. I don't really notice their results being "worse" than Google's (but maybe that's just because I haven't used Google for so long). The Bang feature is also very handy once you get in the habit of remembering to use it. https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Eh. The analytics data is pretty low value as far as hacker targets, and this can be mostly mitigated anyways by sane segregation of the admin backend from the publicly accessible site.

There's an open ticket for it, but it looks like it hasn't been addressed in a while since they don't want to break all existing passwords.

https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/5728

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#68
post #26

The 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).

>I guess Apple arbitrarily doesn't support them on my older iPhone

It's not arbitrary - it requires a 64 bit CPU (of which Apple has now shipped 3 generations of).

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#69
post #20

I'm doing my part. I'm moving to DuckDuckGo for searching more and more. It's a process. Google does have better results. For work I still rely on Google, for private stuff I use https://duckduckgo.com/ And for the sake of ducks, I'm eating less meat as well. No more chicken - too much antibiotics, and as little meat as possible, only when it's worth it, so great taste and good quality.

More and more, if I'm not satisfied with DDG, I will Google that term, only to get the same stuff.
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