To Track or Not to Track? An Interesting Question

Yesterday @ecoinstant asked me an interesting question: "Do we know who or how many people are using our tools?"

It's a fantastic question that gets to the heart of a big topic in the web development world: user analytics versus privacy. My immediate answer was, "As far as I know, no." And to be honest, I think that's how it should be. I believe I will always be in favor of not adding any kind of intrusive, third-party tracking scripts to the tools and websites we run.

But... the question did make me curious. While I'll never add something like Google Analytics, what can be learned in a privacy-respecting way, just from the raw data that a web server already generates?

So, I put together a tiny script to parse through our Caddy server logs to get some very basic, anonymous usage statistics. The script simply counts the total number of requests and the number of unique IP addresses that have connected to each site over a given period. It doesn't track who you are or what you do on the page, just that someone visited.

Here's what I found:

It's really neat to see this high-level view! It's no surprise that Market-Viewr (viewr) is the most active site, but it's also cool to see the consistent traffic to tools like the RC claimer (claimr) and the dice roller (dice).

For me, this kind of anonymous data is the perfect compromise. It satisfies our curiosity as developers to know that the tools are being used and are providing value, but it does so without ever compromising the privacy of the people using them. We don't need to know who you are to appreciate that you're here.

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM