Wednesday, January 26th, 2022
One of my favorite things to do is look at the analytics for my websites. Watching numbers like user growth go up (or down) is pretty addictive, and also motivating.
For websites built on Paper Website, including this daily blog, analytics are handled by Google. You paste in a special analytics tracking code to get it all set up.
However, this is a fairly complex process requiring a lot of steps. I checked yesterday to see how many websites had actually set up analytics, and it was only around 15%.
Even for me who had analytics active, it wasn't nice having to leave Paper Website to check it on Google.
Therefore, yesterday morning, with a coffee in hand, I built my own internal micro-analytics system for Paper Website:
I'm really happy with the results. I actually think it displays analytics in a much easier to read way than Google did.
I've got basic metrics like views, unique views and page view time - with lots of other features planned, like seeing how many people are live viewing your website.
Not bad for a website built with pen and paper!