Analytics on personal websites
Sometimes I see people dismiss any analytics on personal websites as “vanity statistics”, or even outright dismiss it as “spyware”. I don’t think that’s the case, but then again since I’m working on an analytics app so of course I would say that 🙃 I did write GoatCounter specifically for my personal use on this website long before I had any plans with it (first pageview: May 21st 2019).
It’s sometimes useful to have an indication what people are reading, or if anyone is reading something at all. For a while I maintained a Vim ChangeLog as I felt it would be useful to have such a thing.[1] Maintaining that is quite labour-intensive and boring, and it turned out no one was actually reading it; so I stopped maintaining it. Without some form of analytics, I would have no way of knowing this.
There are some other projects as well where this is useful; e.g. The Art of Unix Programming, or bestasciitable.com. It’s just useful to know how popular such projects are before I choose to spend more time on them.
