Edit: apparently they do suck though

I did it. I broke down and added some Javascript analytics code here. I just want to have fancier stats than I get from Apache logs, okay? I promise it’s not actually spooky though, and I hope to hold this forth as a demonstration that you can actually have decent real-time analytics without going full panopticon. As usual you just have to care about privacy … like even a little bit.

Anyway, it’s at least all still self-hosted, and I’ve gone out of my way to keep it all privacy-respecting. I’m using open-source software called Matomo to collect these analytics. I put the following config options in place to ensure that I’m being as privacy-conscious as I can about this:

Anonymizing the last two bytes of your IP address, so even I can’t see anyone’s full IP.
Stripping query parameters from referrer URLs to avoid capturing any information about you if you are referred here from another site that keeps identifying info in its URLs.
Raw data is deleted after 30 days and only aggregate data is kept long-term.
Do not track headers are respected.

As always, you can also read all about your privacy on my site from the privacy page that is linked in the footer.