I’m considering trying an analytics package on this blog. I’ve avoided this because all of the ones I’ve seen are a privacy nightmare and slow down the site.
Also, do I really need to know what analytics has to tell me?
However the other day I read a few interesting blog posts from a company called Plausible and it made me curious about their product. They take privacy seriously, and they are an old-fashioned “bootstrapped start-up”, so at least for now they’re not likely to be coerced into doing anything nasty.
But what do I need analytics for? I don’t really need them, but it might be kind of fun to see what gets read and shared. That might help me decide where to spend my time on future posts, or what topics to revisit.
I also just like the idea of supporting companies that are at least trying to avoid being evil.
All that said I’m not completely sure I want to add any unnecessary complexity to Preposter.us . Right now everything is static with a tiny drop of JavaScript that only reads local data to draw the indexes (which are also static JSON files). Adding Plausible means adding a call out to a remote server which is something I’ve avoided so far.
Maybe I’ll try it for a month and see what happens if it’s not to difficult to add to Preposter.us. I can always remove it if there’s any complaints or if it doesn’t turn out to be worthwhile.