Hey! 👋 A question for everyone, do you have analytics on your personal sites?
How do you go about it?
I’m not a fan of it myself but having at least a minimal insight should be helpful, what do you think?
@justamoment@twtxt.net hmm…
Talking about Web sites, 20 years ago I used Web counters, then Google Analytics, FB Pixel, and many other indie stats systems. I think I had the Apache stats, then WordPress and such, but I wasn’t excited by stats dashboards TBH.
Now I think visits are vanity metrics, even for commercial sites, so I rely more on interactions, emails received, replies, and such.
On https://text.eapl.mx I have nothing. No comments section, and no analytics whatsoever. I received a message every 1-2 months, and I think I had a few replies on Gemini (it’s difficult to track, and I forgot to add the link in the article)
In my ‘personal’ podcast I have no stats, it’s a handmade Atom file.
For the remaining podcasts hosted on YouTube and Anchor, I have from 20 plays/views up to 9k for some specific topics (mostly design ones disguised as rants). And I think 120 subscribers.
I’m not a fan of it myself but having at least a minimal insight should be helpful, what do you think?
It’s been tricky for me. If I write for myself, I don’t need that content to be public, but if I share it, I expect something from the audience. A discussion or a conversation is neat. A thank you is also welcome.
I’ve found that having numbers makes me leave projects since only a few people are watching them. I don’t know… I switched from carrying about how many people are watching to “at least someone cares’.
I received this year a few comments and IM chats saying ‘thanks’ for the free content. That’s always a breath of fresh air for the creator. I think that depends on your expectations.
@justamoment@twtxt.net I do and use self hosted goat counter for this – But it’s basically really just access logs stats
I basically run GoatCounter for https://salty.im and https://yarn.social (the landing pages)
@eaplmx@twtxt.net I see, caring interactions over cold numbers, I understand your reasoning.
A way to speak with the content author is a really great way to being engaged with others.
@prologic@twtxt.net My main reason to have analytics is to track the general activity on side projects I plan to make, the main reason is to see if any promotion I do has a comeback on the site.
Thanks for sharing the tool name.
@justamoment@twtxt.net I would highly recommend to goat counter then!
but make sure you’re on your own instant somewhere!
@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, having it self-hosted is the only way since the main site is down anyway. 🙄
@justamoment@twtxt.net I don’t even have Web server logs enabled.
Yeah, for a personal blog or something I’d show a plain contact form rather than using analytics, even on site with it enabled I didn’t look at them at all, that’s how much I care about numbers. 😎