Kownter

Tracking return visits with The Anonymous Cookie

May 10, 2018

I’m still working through the pros and cons of using cookies. On the one hand, they seem like they will allow some super-useful things at relatively low cost, such as tracking a returning visitor in order to show “visitors” and “unique visitors”. But adding non-essential cookies (analytics are classed as non-essential) means that, in theory,…
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Adding “simple” features

May 3, 2018

I recently added a “simple” toggle so I can show information from different time periods. BUT…this is one of this things that seems trivial but really isn’t because of the kinds of engineering decisions you might make. In this case I’m building and learning test-driven development as I go, and I wanted to use this…
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Competition

April 23, 2018

In which I feel truly validated. I know work on Kownter has stalled – there are other things afoot – but then an “excitable nerd” with 22,000 followers on Twitter says this: What if website analytics software didn't take your users data to line their pockets from advertising? What is website analytics software was simple…
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Why am I doing this, again?

March 11, 2018

I’m totally open to the idea that I will probably end up realising that there are too many problems to solve here and I’ll end up using an off-the-shelf, open source tool instead. But I’m plugging on because it’s fun. I actually now have a very very basic working system that is collecting data from…
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Should I aggregate counts, if and so, when?

March 11, 2018

As I build this thing I’m constantly thinking about performance. I need registering a page view to be as fast and efficient as possible because on a busy site you don’t want to clog the server up with logging views and you want to avoid race conditions where two page views are updating the same…
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Difficult Dates

March 5, 2018

I had an interesting thought about dates which led to me learning something and then feeling a bit stupid. The thing to bear in mind here is that I’m thinking a lot about how this tool could accumulate a LOT of data, and how I can make reporting fast. Perhaps I should jus trust MySQL,…
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More thoughts on HOW to track

February 28, 2018

There seems to be a few possible ways to do the tracking and I think it broadly falls into two categories: use JavaScript to send a request request a resource (image, CSS) using an HTML tag or a CSS property I talked before about the fact that requesting a resource wouldn’t send the details of…
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Getting going

February 24, 2018

I’ve now got a fresh install of Laravel, which will be the framework I’ll try to build this on – it’s both the framework I’m most familiar with, and the one I’m trying to learn more about. I’m going to try to take an approach called “Test Driven Development” (TDD) – which I’m also trying…
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Choosing how to track

February 23, 2018

I’ve been trying to work out how best to do the tracking. There seem to be two options: Request a resource using CSS or an image Make a JS call The main disadvantage of the CSS/image approach is that it won’t be able to send a referrer so we won’t be able to see where…
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