It has been a long time since I posted something and it was time for some clean-up, so bye-bye Google Analytics. It was long pending on my to-do list and really quick to remove but life happened in between and it therefore took a long time to get done.
Google Analytics (GA) has long been a default analytics solutions to get information about the number of users who visited a website, how long they interacted, where they are coming from (both geographically and other website referral page), etc. It is a really complete solution and integrates of course really well with the Google ecosystem. The downside of it all is the hidden cost for the audience. While completely free for the website owner, having Google Analytics in place means that users are getting tracked across the web. GA uses cookies to track users and with GDPR in place in EU, this also means that the audience should be informed about such tracking. In addition, considering all the things that GA offers, for such a simple website as mine, this is actually overkill in most cases since the main thing I might be interested in is the page views (i.e. how popular is a given article). For such a limited use of their tool, users visiting the website still needs to load the GA script which is quite large compared to alternative solutions.
At this point in time, I am not installing any other analytics solution. I have identified a couple of alternatives, Plausible and Fathom, that look attractive but I would need to dig more into this. I’ll communicate more about this if / when I put something in place.
In the meantime, enjoy not being tracked when browsing this website :-).
For the time being, comments are managed by Disqus, a third-party library. I will eventually replace it with another solution, but the timeline is unclear. Considering the amount of data being loaded, if you would like to view comments or post a comment, click on the button below. For more information about why you see this button, take a look at the following article.