Useless Analytics

I don't have any fancy analytics on my site. I've been told I don't need them[1]. In any case, installing some such software is against the hand-rolled approach I take with this site.

I do still want to look at stats. I do this by grepping through my server logs. I even set up a way to log webmentions. I know it's best not to obsess too much, but I want such Internet Points[2] as I can get.

The results? The data I have are pretty useless. Part of that is just that I don't get enough traffic for any really interesting patterns to emerge. The exact proportion fluctuates, but the majority of traffic by a wide margin is RSS readers pinging my feed. Which, sure, tells me there are some people interested in my site, but nothing about what they're reading, or even how many individual people are reading. Even for the pages that do receive direct traffic, the problem is that one of the places I share my posts is on Mastodon. Due to the federated nature of Mastodon, this results in dozens of servers fetching the page just to generate a link preview. You get a lot of traffic that has nothing at all to do with who's actually seeing it.

I have a mind to try adding a like button or something to my blog posts. Mostly just for the exercise of building that system from scratch. And just to make sure I don't take those internet points too seriously I'm thinking of just adding a billion or so to the counts as a bit of fun. It's my site, I get to decide how many likes are on my posts :).