My lack of blogging recently has bothered me. Part of it was that I was a little burnt out. I just had very little to talk about. But there was something else. Around that same time Umami decided to go to version 3.0. For those of you who don’t know, Umami is a Google Analytics alternative that is self hostable and privacy focused. The problem is, the new update is garbage. The new UI is unintuitive an requires more work to get around to stats you’d like to see.

So, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out what to do next. I like having stats (more on this in a moment), so I wanted something. There are other self-hostable analytics suites out there. The issue I had was that they were either way too much for what I need (Matomo or Plausible), or just not any good at all.

So about a week ago, I decided to code my own. I had no clue where to even start, but I figured that it couldn’t be that hard. Yeah. I’m a moron. LOL. It was really hard. Turns out, and I should have known this, there are a ton of security standards that regulate what can and cannot be tracked and analytics have to thread the needle. It took me forever to figure out how to do that, and even now after mine is up and running, I’m not sure how well I’ve done that.

But the dev work isn’t really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about why. Why do I need stats? It’s not as if I make money on this site. I’m not selling anything. Neither my behavior nor my content change based on how many people actually read my stuff. This blog is for me.

But, there’s a big difference between all of that and feeling like you’re shouting into the abyss. I like knowing someone reads my stuff. I don’t even particularly care if more than one person reads it, but the knowledge that someone out there took the time to click on a link somewhere to read one of my posts keeps me motivated to write more. Why? I don’t know. All the stuff I said above, about this blog being for me, is true. Yet, I still want to have an audience. I’m a diva, apparently.

Maybe, it’s about expectations. When I have no stats, I have no clue if there is anyone out there who wants another post from me. When I have stats, I have people that might be disappointed if they don’t hear from me. Sounds like I’m a bit full of myself, doesn’t it? But I think that’s true of anyone who has an audience, no matter the size. You don’t want to disappoint them, even if it’s unlikely that they’ll actually be disappointed.

So, I have my stats running. I will probably write about how I created them eventually. I want to make sure they’re actually working, and that I didn’t do anything horrible. I will say that I’m really really enjoying TypeScript lately. Also node.js has also been very enjoyable. I never really thought I’d do much in the way of front or backend web dev, but I’ve had a lot of fun. Add in all the Rust I’ve written lately, and I’ll be a proper developer someday (probably not, lol).