Simple Analytics is Great

When I revamped by personal site, I used Lee Robinson's site as inspiration. One of the things I liked most that his site has is view counts on the articles that he has written. I wanted to have the same.

Researching a bit and looking into the repo, at the time, Lee was calling the Google Analytics API directly from the NextJS API routes.

At some point in time, I saw Pieter Levels tweet some of his graphs for his websites and it the data was collected through Simple Analytics.

After comparing the documentation and API references side by side, I decided to go with Simple Analytics because the API documentation seems far more straightforward, and many browsers and adblockers shouldn't block Simple Analytics, especially if I am using a self hosted version of it under sa.evan.gg. Although Simple Analytics is a yearly subscription, I figured the lack of headaches and dev annoyance would far outweigh saving $100.

Simple Analytics also allows you to track data on unlimited sites with your subscription. That should be great when I launch more side projects 😄

It was super fast to get up and running, and voila, I have view counts on my pages too. Thanks for the inspiration Lee!

// Simple NextJS API route to fetch the page views!

import fetch from "node-fetch";

export default async function handler(req, res) {
    // pages = 1 or many slugs to query
    const pages = req.query.pages;
    const headers = {
        "Api-Key": process.env.SA_API_KEY,
    };

    if (!pages) { ... }

    const url = "https://simpleanalytics.com" +
        "/evan.gg.json" +
        "?version=5" +
        "&info=false" +
        "&start=2021-05-10" +
        "&fields=pages,pageviews" +
        `&pages=${pages}`;

    const response = await fetch(url, { headers }
        ).then((r) => r.json());

    if (!response?.pages) { ... }

    const pagesResponse = response?.pages
        .map(({ value, pageviews }) => {
            return {
                path: value,
                pageviews,
            };
        });

    res.status(200).json(pagesResponse);
}

The dashboard is pretty sick!