GoatCounter for Blog Analytics

I recently added GoatCounter, an open source web analytics platform. I got the idea from reading one of my favourite blogs how.wtf. It's not that I necessarily needed to add any analytics to my website. There was no Google Analytics that needed to be replaced, and the platform I'm using (Cloudflare) to deploy this website actually offers me basic but free website analytics out of the box.

Why did I still spend a Saturday adding GoatCounter to my website? The truth is that I felt guilty that I haven't written any new posts for my personal blog for a while and at the same time have no exciting new ideas for a post. This struggle is quite apparent if you look at the timestamps and number of my blog posts. But I have this personal blog to practice, and if I have no good ideas myself, then I check blogs from others and challenge myself to implement their ideas. That helps me to get going, and along the way I can learn new things.

Whilst adding GoatCounter, it wasn't just a matter of downloading it and adding a script as described in their documentation. I had to research e.g. how to bundle environment variables for my browser and how or where in Cloudflare to add them so that they would be available to my deployment. The solutions were easy enough, but I wouldn't have known them off the top of my head, and I still wouldn't if I hadn't chosen a simple project like adding GoatCounter.