Tiny thought: Trying out Plausible Analytics

I’ve added Plausible Analytics to this site, probably temporarily and mostly out of idle curiosity. I really like the new wave of privacy-focused analytics tools (like Plausible, and their competitor Fathom). I think it's very important to understand a website's traffic and what content is performing well, but not at the cost of handing all your users’ data to giant ad-tech monsters like Google.

The Plausible JavaScript snippet is ridiculously simple, and adding it to a website like this couldn't be easier. I even went through the extra headache of proxying Plausible through CloudFront to avoid certain adblockers, and even that was easy and well-documented.

Having analytics on a site like this is pretty useless. I have about 15 unique visitors so far (one of whom is me), and most of them are getting sent to one of my blog posts that has happened to show up in a common Google search.

However, before adding Plausible I didn't know any of that information about my site's traffic...so now I know.