When I set this blog up, I deliberately didn't worry about analytics. I thought it wasn't needed, and I appreciate a site that isn't calling out to a dozen different tracking sites.

After a couple days, I started wondering, has anybody seen this site beside me? How would I know?

It would be nice to have an idea if anything catches anybody's eye. So I'm softing my hard line.

A quick shout out on Mastodon, and I got a great looking suggestion pretty quickly - goat counter.
Thanks @esg !

I liked the emphasis on no tracking of personal data, and the open source nature. The software and it's ideology is well explained there, I won't reproduce it here.

Installation was very straightforward, and consisted of two parts.
Step one, I signed up at the goat counter site, using their service for now instead of self hosting. I only provided a username and email address, and the website it was going to be installed on.

Step two, I added the simple <script> tag they provide to every page I want counted in my blog. With this pelican installation, that meant I only had to add a single variable into my pelican publishing.yaml

ANALYTICS = """
<script data-goatcounter="https://furicle.goatcounter.com/count"
        async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>
        """

Interestingly, it did not work right away - but not because of a problem goat tracker. I run uBlock Origin on pretty much all my browsers, and the 'Easy Privacy' blocking list, blocks goat counter by default. I disabled it for me, and tested, and the tracking works great.

So, is this a problem? I've decided no. It's actually good that a common privacy tool like uBlock works correctly. If you don't want to be tracked, you won't be, just by doing what you are already doing. And if you aren't running an ad blocker, I'd strongly suggest that you do!

Will I end up with any logged visits on my website? That remains to be seen. Maybe Mom will drop by :-)

If you'd like more info about using goat tracker, or have a question or comment, please, hit me up on Mastodon, and we can continue a conversation, or I can update this blog to be more helpful.