As a website or blog owner, it's natural to be curious about who is visiting your site and what they are reading. An analytics tool can provide valuable insights into your audience's behavior, such as which pages are the most popular, where your visitors are coming from, and how long they are spending on your site. This information can help you make informed decisions about the content you create and how you promote it. One analytics tool that I found to be particularly useful is Ackee, which can be found here (https://github.com/electerious/Ackee).
Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool that places a strong emphasis on privacy. As a user, one of the benefits of using Ackee is that no cookies are stored, which can be verified by checking the dev tools.
Ackee is a great choice for those who are looking for a less detailed analytics solution compared to tools like Matomo or Google Analytics. Ackee's developers have stated this themselves in the FAQ section of their GitHub page, (https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#comparison).
In my experience, I have found Ackee to be a great fit for my needs as I am running it in Kubernetes. The process of setting up and configuring Ackee was relatively straightforward and it has been a reliable tool for gathering analytics data.
Ackee also works beautifully with Gatsby, the popular static site generator. I installed a package called gatsby-plugin-ackee-tracker and added the following to my gatsby-config.js file:
resolve: "gatsby-plugin-ackee-tracker",
options: {
// Domain ID found when adding a domain in the Ackee admin panel.
domainId: "YOUR_ACKEE_DOMAIN_ID",
// URL to Server eg: "https://analytics.test.com".
server: "https://analytics.test.com",
// Disabled analytic tracking when running locally
ignoreLocalhost: true,
// Enable or disable the tracking of your own visits (as identified by your login to the Ackee dashboard).
ignoreOwnVisits: false,
// If enabled it will collect info on OS, BrowserInfo, Device & ScreenSize
detailed: false,
}This plugin makes it easy to integrate Ackee with Gatsby, allowing me to track my website's performance without compromising on privacy. The options provided in the configuration file allows me to customize the tracking settings according to my preference. The ability to ignore localhost, ignore own visits and disable detailed analytics tracking is a great feature which allows me to test the website without skewing the analytics data.
If you are looking for a privacy-focused analytics solution that is easy to set up and run, Ackee is definitely worth checking out.