The site analytics is dead. Long live the analytics.
I ditched web analytics for a faster site and more meaningful reader interactions!
A not so humble brag wrapped in a delicious data taco.
Last week, I got rid of Cloudflare’s privacy-friendly, free, and therefore approximate web page analytics from my website. Now I only use Cloudflare’s caching. More on that after answering the question that must be gnawing at your cortex…
Why?
Well I’m glad your brain thought it.
Firstly, for customer service improvements.
Apparently tens of thousands of people visit my blog each month. That means about 100 people actually read through something, assuming a 99% bounce rate because the average Eval/Apply post size is “many thousands of words”, with a 1:1 ratio of body text to footnote text. So in the interest of faster customer service, it behooves me to remove all obstacles and/or choke points that stand between these intrepid Internet denizens, and these words of mine they pine for.
Secondly, for self improvement.
“Number go up up up” is a fun game. Nice dopamine hits. But a cycle of addiction for someone who is an information junkie, like yours truly. Also I don’t want to accidentally Goodhart’s Law myself into becoming a “content creator” / “influencer”. Our M.O. at Eval/Apply must always be “Writing = Thinking”. We love website statistics porn
Thirdly, for more serendipity.
In terms of raw joy, getting email from random Internet strangers is up there with the best. And now I’m pretty sure that correlation is causation. Since removing that JavaScript, I've received emails from (checks notes) three delightful gentlenerds to discuss some topic, or just say hi (apropos my standing invitation). That is three more than the month preceding, while analytics was live. Also, now the site has no JS. And we all know no JS is the fastest JS out there. QED.
Lastly, but not leastly, to do everything fastly and cheaply.
While the detailed website page analytics is no more, Cloudflare pages still shows me total site traffic. In the last 30 days, it looks like they who visit websites, drew out 5.29 GB worth of 100% static website content. This stats-showing isn't just about humble-bragging. It's about being humbled...
1. Arbitrarily large traffic surges can happen to anyone on the public Internet. But you have to be there to see it!
2. As pleasing as the numbers are to my eye, I bet my blog is not even close to popular. Doesn’t matter; the one random email discussion a month is everything. Write to me!
3. And as I stated previously, I'm not even trying --- we are in the languid, slow-burn, multi-thousand-word-lengthing "Writing = Thinking" business, not in the eyeball-clickbaiting business.
No, the aggregate stats made me marvel (yet again!) at the eye-watering scale of Internet Infrastructure build-out.
The little guy can get world-class world-wide caching, er, hosting for zero operational pain (after some intricate, brow-sweat-inducing first time Cloudflare configuration). Because I remember paying through our noses for a puny colo VPS with a hair-thin data outlet, circa 2008, which is honestly not so long ago. And because, right before that, I got to experience the telecom boom that made the Internet boom possible.
Since Y2K, mind melting kilometers of backhaul fiber, and in the recent decade+, last-mile fiber, have been laid down. Not to mention the scale of datacenter buildouts, as measured in cricket stadiums that could have been built instead. (The market has spoken... There's obviously a delicate macroeconomic balance between the number of IT workers that have been v/s Cricketers that could have been.)
It's just wild.
Aside: Incidentally, I got curious and checked my published static content. The drill-down numbers have too much symmetry. Gremlins are at work... or maybe gravitational effects of auspicious planetary alignments have been firing synapses in brain and flipping bits on disk in quantum-entangled cosmic alignment. Truly, the Universe works in mysterious ways.
- The whole site weighs in at 6.4M (all pages and static assets, all fully rendered, but uncompressed and unminified --- I've just blindly assumed github pages web service will gzip everything for me).
- Oddly, posts weigh in at 5.3M.
- So like, if 5.29 GB was pulled down, then on an average, all the posts were downloaded ~1,000 times in the last 30 days?
(No, because, averages lie hard. Most of the downloads was just that one giant post about org-mode, which, also oddly, weighs in at 52K. Aaaand the posts' published HTML page has 5,193 "words" according to wc -w).
If you are reading this line, well I just updated my website too, and I’m a bit terrified, to be honest… because I’ve stated publicly that I want to run a “Writing for nerds” workshop, and I’m still figuring out what that even means 😅 … So, have a look-see and tell me what you feel: https://www.evalapply.org/
Thanks for reading.
Have a lovely morning / noon / evening / night, wherever you are.
-Adi.
P.S. And if you think your nerd friends might like to know about the “Writing for nerds” thing, please forward them the subscription form: