Sal's ➶ ⋆˙⟡

Flying blind

No more analytics for me!

After moving my blog, I thought I’d be using Cloudflare’s analytics, which are semi-built-in and purport to be privacy-first and lightweight. But when I went to set them up, I learned they’re not available for static sites like mine. I can guess why that might make sense for static content that’s just cached in an edge network.

I took a look at other privacy-focused offerings and even tried one out briefly, but I decided against them.

Why not

First, I really don’t want to add any JavaScript to this site. Right now, when you hit my home page and inspect the network requests, there’s only one request:

Name        Domain      Type      Transfer Size  Time
sals.place  sals.place  document  4.07 KB        26.7ms

That’s a thing of beauty to me. An ideal of sorts. I don’t want to muddy it up unless I have to.

The question, then, is whether I need analytics. And the answer is, of course I don’t!

I did enjoy perusing the analytics in Bear Blog. But are they important? Are they actionable? Does the information mean anything to me? No, not really.

All I want to know is that there are a couple readers somewhere out there, that I’m not just yammering into the void. And I already know that because I get an email or two a week from readers who are generous enough to follow David’s advice.

What more do analytics offer? Perhaps validation that, bit by bit, I’m getting a more diverse array of viewers and referrers. But who cares, really? That’s not my goal here.

What less do analytics offer? Distraction and worry over meaningles data points.

Smarter takes from smarter people

From Manu’s I don’t want your data:

I, on the other end, couldn’t care less about your data. I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content. I just don’t care.

From Kev’s Revisiting the Web Analytics Rabbit Hole:

I’m blissfully unaware of how many people visit this blog. It may have grown, it may have significantly reduced. I don’t know.

But I do know this; I still get lots of great engagement from the content I produce thanks to the reply by email button on the bottom of this and every other post.

From Rach Smith’s I turned off analytics (and Kev’s link):

The analytics data [became] boring, to be honest. I don’t care about what gets ranked on Google, I’m not trying to optimise for the people who come from that channel.

I keep writing on this site because it is the best way to find people who have similar interests as me. In particular - the nerds, because my IRL social relationships are with people who are very much on the normy side of the normy-to-nerdy spectrum.

From Keenan’s I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers:

But, let’s be honest: it’s mostly noise. The data sucks and also the data sucks. It sucks because it’s basic and trivial and mostly just “a person went to this page and they stayed for a moment,” and it sucks because it’s a distraction. As much as I want to create a story and develop a better understanding and make a connection, I’m not going to find that in an IP address no matter how hard I try. Cosplaying internet detective doesn’t do much to sate my curiosity, it just lets me spin my wheels and trick me into thinking I’m being productive.

Email me and send me more, please!