Using that role (alongside a few others), you can install a production-grade Fathom instance in just a few lines of YAML: I noticed that there so far was no Ansible role on Galaxy for Fathom, so I went ahead and added geerlingguy.fathom. Many people know me as 'the Ansible guy'-either for my book, or for one of a zillion posts I've written on Ansible (mostly for my own memory, but luckily they're helpful for others too!). Maybe by the end you'll want to try it out, too! Building a reproducible Fathom server In this blog post, I'll document how I did it, how it's working out, and compare it to Google Analytics. So in the interest of going back to a simpler time, when I ran my own Urchin server and tracked analytics locally, I've decided to give Fathom a chance, and started sending all the analytics for my personal and SaaS websites to a new Fathom server: Plus, I have to disable my ad blocker every time I go to view analytics! Not only that, trying to get just the data that I care about out of Google Analytics can be a time sink. But this all comes at a cost sure, Google Analytics is free, but Google uses the gobs of data about Internet usage it gets from tracking half the Internet for it's own purposes (much like it uses free-to-upload Google Photo data for AI training purposes). The amount of data you can get out of GA is pretty amazing, and you can add custom event tracking, track website goals and conversion rates, and program your own metrics and events. With such a fun logo, how could Google resist acquiring it? It quickly became (and remains) the de-facto standard for website usage analytics and user tracking.īefore that you basically had web page visit counters (some of them with slightly more advanced features ala W3Counter and Stat Counter), and then on the high end you had Urchin Web Analytics (which is what Google acquired and turned into a 'cloud' version, naming the new product Google Analytics and tying it deeply into the Google AdWords ecosystem). Since the mid-2000s, right after it became available, I started using Google Analytics for almost every website I built (whether it be mine or someone else). Tl dr: I'm now using Fathom for my personal website analytics, and it's easy to self-host and maintain, better for privacy, and can lead to better site performance.
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