PostHog Speaks My Language For Static Site Analytics

And that language is, specifically, no cookies!

You can tell a lot about something by the way it avoids needing a cookie banner, and I'm tired of having fundamentally two tenable choices when it comes to making new things for the public to use:

• Force invasive analytics on people, or,

• Develop blindly without collecting much meaningful usage data.

Another option, please?

I just can't accept analytics still being a Kobayashi Maru for us little people so I went looking at alternatives and wow, PostHog really stood out as being primarily privacy respecting. In addition to that, it can record sessions, roll out canary releases, do your split tests and way more.

It's not just that it can do really amazing things, it's that it can do them without requiring you to implement a cookie banner.

They actually seem to grasp the difference between carefully observing things and being a creepy stalk-y neck-breather.

Static Sites Can Be Weird Kids To Make Friends With As A Product

We find interesting ways to bring in functionality that other sites do without as many moving parts, like having comments hosted on Mastodon, or not being able to directly control all search events, or other things that, for admins that have many different parts coming together, just aren't possible.

We tend to have stuff in weird places, make heavy use of freemium plans, almost always have to select "other" from the list of supported frameworks and generally live where content teams haven't spent much time because we're a small sliver of use cases.

And here I am, telling you how un-annoying I found it to use.

PostHog Doesn't Try To Impose "A Way" For Most Things

Sure, there's a way that you're supposed to use lots of things, like toasters and sub machine guns, but PostHog is designed around you not really needing to care about which way things are facing or if they're in water, only that you're getting enough data from your events.

On a code level, it's as easy or easier to use than GA. You use capture() to grab events and as much (or little) information about them as you need. Then you go to the dashboard and look at all your data. Like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his coins. Well, you may have to wait for a lot of data to accumulate for that, but you hopefully get what I mean.

That's it. No figuring out where it is, or why you can't see it in certain views, or any of the other overwhelming curve that comes with GA4: you just have to care that you're capturing the right data with the right context in the right places. You don't have to feel like you're constantly fighting against GA4 being incomprehensible for the first six months while you learn its mind-bending ways of being used.

It Has Many Tools, But Doesn't Force Them On You

In probably one of the most generous "freemium" plans out there, you basically get everything a real honest to goodness product manager would want if they wanted to avoid constantly infuriating their users with breaking changes:

• All of the analytics you need to know your users (better than GA4 IMHO)

• Visitor session recordings and replays (configurable down to the element)

• A/B Testing Framework

• Feature Flag Management

• Growth Experiment Management

• SQL Explorer For Basically Everything, including third-party services

My use is kind of narrow, and kind of special. While I enjoy making themes for other people, like this one Cushy Text, my main "jam" is working on platforms for my own fiction and non-fiction. I just use my programming and tech background in order to accomplish that.

Using PostHog, I can make sure features in my templates are as nicely-tuned as they can be for you, and I can make sure my own sites delight my few hundred or so readers instead of royally pissing them off.

While I am a programmer, you don't need to be one in order to use PostHog. It just helps .. a lot.

And that leads me to my only criticism of the product:

It's Kind Of Overwhelming At First

They do a pretty great job of onboarding, and there's a lot of help available even after you think you've finished onboarding. The way they've structured the app to show you things just-in-time and the way it provides notebooks and contextually appropriate help on the sidebar is great.

But it's still >gestures at all of it< pretty massive, and it's going to intimidate you. It doesn't make you feel hopeless in the same way that GA4 does, like you just found out that you can't ever eat salty snacks again, but it does inspire that holy cow look at all this stuff to learn kind of panic.

And, that's why I like that it's structured so you don't have to try every dang feature in their arsenal before any one of them work. They're actually vested in you succeeding, not just narrating success through metrics to their investors.

But, I think it's laid out for learning about as well as any type of application of its kind can be.

It Won't Victimize You For Succeeding

This is, I think, probably the most important feature. You're not going to wake up to a non-functional analytics platform just because you got lucky enough to have something go viral overnight.

I like how the plans are structured so you can automatically go over the free limits, but you won't be charged unless you do, and the limits seem to be setup so that you're firmly into "able to monetize if needed" if you ever reach that point.

I think of analytics as part of an accessible site because you won't fully understand how people are actually using what you make without them. I think we're way past the days of where we could responsibly just look at server-side logging and say we've got the big picture.

I'm Not Bundling It With Themes, But For A Very Simple Reason

I think almost everyone who uses CushyText will want some kind of analytics, and many people probably already have a setup that they've worked hard on. So, me bundling something wouldn't really save many people much work, and that's the goal of inclusion.

But even if they didn't, we all care about different kinds of things when it comes to what data gets captured, and at what stages it happens. Code I put In to just track the general use of the template would just mean more code you probably need to rip out in order to get the data picture that you need.

I'm just pointing the way to something that seems better and solidly more ethical than what's out there as the mainstream, de-facto platform.

Besides, it's just a little JS in _includes/partials/head.vto if you want to install it yourself ;)

I'll have it enabled on this site prior to the actual launch.