Part 1: Why I Need Analytics for My Personal Blog
I spent my first few months of blogging writing into the void. Hit publish, share the link, and wait—for nothing. No comments, no emails, no signal that anyone had seen the words. It felt like shouting into an empty hallway.
For a long time, I wore my lack of analytics as a badge of honor. I told myself that a personal blog shouldn’t be optimized like a marketing funnel. I didn’t want to track people, didn’t want the complexity of consent banners, and I certainly didn’t want the surveillance culture of Google Analytics. I was using privacy as an excuse for inertia, and deep down, I knew it.
But the silence was its own kind of void.
The turning point was realizing that “analytics” doesn’t have to mean surveillance. There’s a persistent misunderstanding that understanding your audience requires invasive profiling. It doesn’t. You can learn what matters without knowing who is doing the reading.
What if I could measure engagement without a single cookie? What if I could show unique visitors per post and average reading depth—how far people scroll before leaving? A public signal of what resonates.
That is the project I’m starting: a privacy-first analytics system built for my own Jekyll blog. No surveillance, just signal.
Tools like Plausible and Umami prove this approach works at scale. I want to see how far I can take it rolling my own on a static site — and make the results public.
The goal isn’t to optimize. I don’t want to chase trends or write what’s popular. What I want is simpler: to let readers see that a story is worth their time. If a post has 50 unique visitors and most read to the end, that’s a signal — not to me, but to the next person scrolling the archive. “This one resonated. Maybe it resonates with you too.”
My site is accumulating stories about what I build and what breaks. Without any signal, every post in the archive looks the same — a title, a date, silence. But some of those stories genuinely connected with people. I want that visible.
If you’ve blogged, you know the frustration. You write because you have something to say. You stay because someone is listening. Analytics just makes that visible — not as a dashboard I hoard, but as a number on the page that says “this is worth reading.”
In this series, I’ll walk through the design, the implementation, and the live results. If you were building analytics for your own blog, what metrics would you want to see?
Next: Part 2—Designing a privacy-preserving tracking system for a static site.
Sources: Plausible Analytics privacy policy (no cookies, no personal data) · Umami (open-source, self-hosted analytics)