Google Analytics is free because you’re the product. Your visitors are the product. Everyone’s data gets hoovered up and fed into the advertising machine. For a personal blog that gets maybe dozens of readers, this feels… excessive.

I wanted to know which posts people actually read. That’s it. Not their shoe size, not their political leanings, not enough data to build a psychological profile. Just page views.

The Setup

Val Town provides free serverless functions with a built-in SQLite database. Perfect for a tiny analytics backend:

1. Blog page loads, fires a tracking beacon to Val Town
2. Val Town logs the hit (page path, referrer hostname, viewport width, parsed browser/OS)
3. Dashboard fetches aggregated stats via a /stats endpoint
4. Optionally sync to a GitHub Gist for archiving

The tracking beacon is an image request - no JavaScript library, no cookies, no fingerprinting. The “pixel” is a 1x1 transparent GIF that returns instantly.

What Gets Collected

What Doesn’t Get Collected

• IP addresses (not stored, not hashed, not touched)
• Cookies
• Anything that could identify a specific person

If you visit my blog, I know someone read the page. I don’t know it was you. That’s the point.

The Dashboard

A single HTML file at tools.ianp.io/analytics shows the last 30 days of stats. Sign in with GitHub to sync snapshots to a Gist for long-term storage (Val Town’s free tier caps at 10MB, roughly 35k hits).

The OAuth flow uses the Cloudflare Worker proxy I wrote about earlier. Everything stays client-side except the token exchange.

Tradeoffs

This setup won’t tell you bounce rates, session duration, or conversion funnels. If you need that level of insight, you probably need a real analytics product.

But for “did anyone read my post about parsing code with LLMs?” - this works fine. And nobody’s privacy got trampled in the process.