Plausible Blog

> Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake.

GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/

Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing.

That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/

I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.

As for performance, I guess it depends on whether you care about any of the above, whether they actually help you make your site better. If performance was the top goal, we probably wouldn't be using Angular, React or anything like that in the first place, but only very lightweight options. Or, you know, not putting ads…

I have been fighting a lot with Ghost.

It is good if the provided features are good and enough for you.. but if they aren't, then you are in trouble. I would like to note that Ghost is meant mostly for making content behind subscriptions, since they prioritize adding and improving their subscription features.

The content is meant to be written by hand, with some limitations.

Templating engine is limited, if you want to have some static pages. It is very difficult to generate something from custom data, other than your posts or pages. I wish Ghost had some custom key-value endpoint with their API, but instead if you want to add anything custom, it must be set to the custom configuration file, and it is very limited.

Eventually, you need to embed JSON into JS and then generate some parts of the HTML on client side, what you would instead like to do these in server side.
E.g. if you would like to show for example a table with data.
Or you need to use some other static site generator to build the HTML table from JSON.

Something very simple, but yet so difficult.

I liked that it was possible to use SQLite3 in production for Ghost. It worked very well and scales as well since it is mostly read operation, but they are officially dropping support for production and using only MySQL. I guess the one argument was, that sending emails for many subscribers was too much for SQLite.

There is also another good analytics service, without cookies and also fully GDPR compliant:…

Oh that's really cool. To answer your questions:

- A/B testing: not supported yet, although we are thinking on building this. Would love to learn more from your use case!
- Incoming referral, bounce rate, time on page are available through our built-in analytics. If you're familiar with Plausible https://plausible.io, we're using their self-hosted version to offer the analytics feature, so you should get everything they offer.
- Not familiar with n8n.io, looks like it's similar to Zapier. We don't have any integration like this yet, but most functional components that you can add to your Typedream site (like forms, waitlist, etc) can be done using HTML embeds. For example, to add a form, you can embed an Airtable form in your Typedream site. This means that any automation supported by those tools can be used.

With that said, interactions such as allowing customer to buy a product, sending emails, and adding orders to Airtable/Google Sheets can be done by using a third party service, like Stripe Payment Links to allow users to buy a product, then use Stripe's functionality or Zapier/n8n.io integrations to send emails or add orders to Airtable/Google Sheets. This is also the case with comments, for example you can embed https://commentbox.io/ into your Typedream site to enable comments.

Hope this makes sense!

OP, how does this scheme work? If the client is authoritative, that means anybody can just copy that network request and spam you with fake data for that domain. Indeed, if I copy that network request and curl it with changed headers, I still get a 200, which suggests that this is the case...

I'm also concerned about your claim for GDPR compliance. Keeping an IP address for a day and then incrementing against it is still storing personal information, even if it's not in a cookie. Using a server to do the tracking doesn't automatically exempt it from cookie notices.

Storing the IP address for a day doesn't automatically make it non-PII, either. At the very least you should be hashing it. See what Plausible does at https://plausible.io/data-policy or read up on the GDPR discussion at https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2014/wp216_en.pdf

Clickhouse has got a lot better in limited memory environments. They now recommend 4GB minimum.

The production environment that crashed due to Clickhouse OOM was our hosted product a while ago :) After that, we haven't had any downtime on our Clickhouse DB for over a year.

The issue with disk space stems from a bad default configuration. Clickhouse used to have EXTREMELY noisy debug level logging enabled by default with no rotation. This has been fixed in our hosting repo[1] so you get sensible defaults.

If you don't want to worry about downtime, planning disk space or compute capacity, then that's exactly what we offer at https://plausible.io. We process and keep the visitor data on our Hetzner servers in Germany.

1. https://github.com/plausible/hosting

If you're looking for web analytics, I love and can recommend Plausible (https://plausible.io/). It's both simple and privacy-friendly.

Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu (https://fugu.lol). Fugu is a simple and privacy-friendly product analytics tool. It offers only event-based tracking, so it's better suited for web or mobile apps and not web sites (go for Plausible for websites). Fugu doesn't track unique users or any personally identifiable information. It's pretty basic for now, but I'm working on adding conversion funnels next (I work on it in my free time).

Fugu is open-source[0] and self-hostable. I make money by providing a managed version for $9/month.

0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu