If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.
> Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.
You can't be serious. Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"?
This might have been the case in 1995 when there were only a few websites around, and Internet use was considered leisure time and not part and parcel of everyday life.
For what it's worth I find it minorly annoying when people send me emails about my posts. I'm happy for people to comment on them, but typically an email is an invitation to have a private discussion and I'd much rather talk publicly (https://www.jefftk.com/p/comment-dont-message)
You may get more comments/emails than I do. I think I've gotten 3 worthwhile comments and 2 emails in the 8 years my blog has been active. I actually turned comments off, because I was getting thousands of spam daily, and that seems like a waste of everyone's time.
I think comments are probably easier to interact with, but they're more hassle to set up and maintain :( FWIW, I often take interesting points from emails I get and add them as "updates" to blog posts.
My blog only has a few hundred hits, and I haven't put my email address on it or invited anyone to contact me, but I've still gotten emails from two people and had some pleasant conversations.
Or just do it the old fashioned way - have the server keep an access log, then use something like GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/) to produce reports from it. It’s not real-time reporting, but then you probably don’t need real-time reporting for your personal site anyway.
Alas, I don’t control my server, but if I did I would say you might not even need this. If you’re using Google Analytics right now it’s probably better than that, though.
I too don't controll my server, but it turned out that my hosting provider (one.com) has pretty nice access analytics, e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶j̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶.̶c̶o̶m̶'̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶D̶N̶S̶ ̶r̶e̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶V̶P̶S̶ (Edit:Nope it does not, how could it). When I discovered this I dropped GA for most of my projects. I have one remaining project that still uses GA but only bcs I haven't gotten around to fix it. Maybe your hosting provider has analytics too? I had to poke around in the dashboard for one.com to find it.
I don't see anything in what you said that explains the assumption that a popular post is a high-quality post.
Certainly if you're looking to build an audience, then the popularity of your posts is an important metric that will help you craft additional popular posts.
But it seems to me that the the only _quality_ indicator isn't a metric at all - it's actual feedback from people who have read what you've written.
I honestly couldn’t care less which of my blog posts are popular. I write about things interesting to me, which I assume is often too boring or technical for most people. Sometimes people post my stuff to Hacker News and it does well, sometimes it doesn’t, but if I tried to “optimize” this by matching what the site seems to like I wouldn’t write some of my favorite posts.
You are right, you don't need to know it in a small blog or site
But metrics and statistics are the very foundation of science, and the graal of software engineering. I can't resist the temptation of knowing which browsers and the countries of the users of my website, or how many hacker news visitors come to it every other season, so many possibilities... sigh
You really don’t need to know that. I mean, it’s often (but not always: see the perils of optimizing for “clicks”) nice if you could, but you are actively trading the privacy of your visitors for that information.
