I’m currently contemplating adding Google Analytics to this site, for the sake of being able to track visitors. The benefits are straightforward: I love attention, so I’d love to be able to see visitor stats. The detriments are that I’d have to compromise my principles to some extent. I’m a believer in privacy, for myself and others, and feeding my site data to Google’s giant data warehouse seems wrong.

I’ve looked into alternatives of course - for anyone self-hosting, Matomo seems to be the method of choice for anyone looking to assert a little more control over their analytics, what’s tracked, what isn’t, and which privacy options are in place. The problem is I’m hosting with Github Pages, so I don’t have a server to speak of, at least not to run tasks like this. Whereas with Google, I can open my Includes folder and add an innocuous little html file with an innocuous little bit of Javascript, and add an innocuous little tag to my _config.yml folder, and have it ready to go right off the bat. “What’s the harm?” it seems to ask.

Probably nothing, is the real answer - it’s not like I plan for immense amounts of traffic in any case. But it would make me feel bad personally, and we can’t have that. I think I’m going to hold off for now. I can always bite the bullet later.

Forgive me for the self-referential content for now. I woke up wanting to write and sat at my terminal not knowing what to write about, so I’d rather write a little piece about what’s going through my head than not write anything at all. I’m trying to make this a regular exercise, and I do have several good substantive pieces in the works, but that’s the problem - I’m missing enough of the substance to not feel good posting them until I’m good and ready, which may not be for a while, and I need content in the meantime. I’ll have to take a look at what other bloggers do, and where they find the fine line between filler content and substance.