— 1 min read

Today I can happily announce that the Google Analytics tracking code has been removed from this website.

Goodybye Google Analytics & hello Open Web Analytics

I’ve been planning on doing it from a while because I do not like Google Analytics, I don’t like being tracked and I actively stopped trying to use Google services for my own reasons.

The company I work for uses Piwik for some of our clients, I am not a fan of Piwik or how it works and does things. I did some research and found some service providers but their free options were limited or I felt they weren’t a good fit, eventually I stumbled upon Open Web Analytics and decided that it not only suited my purposes, but it meant servers I control would hold the analytical data, rather than some third party.

Hello DuckDuckGo

After launching the new version of …

 — < 1 min read

I was recently tasked with adding Google tracking cookies to our nginx logging for a couple of sites. It was so it could be pushed through a log processor.

It turned out too be a little trickier than it would have been with Apache, but the process itself is still quite simple.

Open up the server definition you wish to add it to and add a custom log format like below

log_format g-a '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ' '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent ' '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" ' '"__utma=$cookie___utma;__utmb=$cookie___utmb;__utmc=$cookie___utmc;__utmv=$cookie___utmv;__utmz=$cookie_umtz"';

This log format can then be added to your access log like below:

access_log /var/log/nginx/access.example.com.log g-a;

Reload nginx

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

If all goes well, you should see Google Analytics appearing in your access logs like below

1.1.1.1 - - [05/Jun/2011:20:35:50 +0100] "GET / HTTP …