Your personal blog does not need analytics

2022-08-30

You don’t need an advanced analytics tool on your personal blog.

Advantages of having no, or only minimal, analytics:

  • Respect your visitors by not feeding their visit to the surveillance capitalism hell machine.
  • You won’t be able to micro-optimise what you write to maximise engagement, which is good because trying to do that will make your writing suck.
  • You won’t annoy me specifically, by showing me a cookie consent banner on a site that 10 people per month read.

You do not need any site analytics on your personal blog, but watching the number of page views go up is rewarding to our monkey brains. So if, like me, you aren’t yet at the don’t-care-at-all-about-views stage, at least use privacy-preserving analytics.

This site uses privacy-preserving analytics. It happens to use Plausible, but other privacy-preserving analytics tools are probably also fine. Here are some (unvetted) options.


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