Why I don’t have analytics and comments on my website

TLDR; No more analytics, share buttons and comments on this blog. Now it is GDPR-friendly as much as possible without cookie banners. All discussions are on Twitter now. At least while I can use it - I’m from Russia. All my posts starting with this one will have a special link to twitter below the text.

I’ve decided to delete analytics, comments and share buttons from all my websites. Why? The main reason is that I don’t want to have cookie settings pop-up like almost all websites have. The cookie banner itself is not the worst thing. You have to have a cookie policy. Great, I can use one from a template. There are thousands of them available online free or paid. But can I actually follow that policy if I use third-party services? Probably…

The only possible way to be sure that my blog is GDPR-compliant is to ditch all functions that require cookies. For my websites these functions are:

• Share buttons
• Analytics (Google or Yandex.Metrika)
• Comments

Is anything from this list necessary?

Definitely not.

Do I use anything from that list to find new topics for posts?

No.

Do I use them at all?

Well… No.

The main goal of all my websites is to be my second brain. Probably, Obsidian, Org-mode, or any other similar system is enough for that. But writing posts that are meant to be available for everyone forces me to organize my thoughts carefully. If I write a post on any topic, I do extra research. I try to find a set of the best examples, links, and so on. And the best thing is that I clarify that topic to myself.

I have my personal knowledge base. Almost all notes there are packs of links and quotes. To make them useful I rewrite them from time to time. Some of them become blog posts because they are important to me. I spend a lot of time writing and rewriting them before they become blog posts.

I have a second minor goal for this blog. I use it to boost my career. Having a public presence is a must nowadays. Some developers have great GitHub profiles, others have gazillion followers on twitter. I prefer having a blog. It is the most comfortable format for me.

Share buttons

First candidates to delete are share buttons. I used to have them under a post. And people used them. I had a couple of shares for almost each blog post I’ve posted here. But not enough to justify having those buttons.

I used to use buttons from one quite popular service which provides a share-anywhere block of buttons. I tried to understand whether they are GDPR friendly. I found no clear answer. So I cut them out from the post template.

Analytics

The most difficult decision was to delete the analytics. I’m used to having it on all my websites since… the Big Bang. It is kind of a habit: if I start a new website, I add analytics on it.

However, I didn’t use it. I had opened the analytics report for this blog right before I cut it out. Before that I opened it half a year ago. Not much usage of the data, isn’t it? If I don’t use it, why on Earth do I collect it?

Comments

My oldest post on this blog was posted in 2016. Since then people have left few comments (about 10 in total). I’ve received many more questions on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

I don’t have much trouble with spam. Disqus has really good spam-protection. But again, I don’t really need Disqus. Like Strobist I’ll get more value starting discussions on Twitter.

Let’s discuss this on Twitter.

P.S. There are not many articles from anyone who decided to run their blogs without analytics or comments. I found this two links very useful: - Why I don’t have analytics on my website - Strobist: Why I Moved Comments to Twitter

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Got a question? Hit me on Twitter: avkorablev