Privacy-Friendly Blog Analytics (Without Selling Your Soul to Google)

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.