I think I know why personal websites aren't popular anymore. It's the same reason retro video games aren't as fun as they were when they came out.
What's missing is the context of the time when they were popular. They were new and had a high-tech aura about them.
Nowadays making a website doesn't differentiate you in a good way unless you have a super creative way of coming up with the website and a lot of content to fill it with.
Nowadays you have to take it to the next level. What's a skill that's beyond the reach of most people? This could be why PCB business cards are so appealing. Because it's a thing most people can't do and if you can do it it shows your technical prowess. I think that's my personal web pages were popular back then and why they won't ever be popular again.
You are probably onto something with this train of thought. I had an Angelfire website when I was 17 in the 90's. All my friends were blown away by my terrible design and color choices because they weren't on the web. Putting something accessible by the entire world out there seemed like magic to them. The web in general felt much more magical then.
I'm ashamed to admit that I use GA on my blog to essentially count page views. The other information is interesting but mostly unused (by me). I would be far better served by a tool or service handling server logs (any recommendations?). But GA is 0 friction, so it's what I picked up back in the day. I suspect there are a lot of people in this boat.
Even for page views, 10 lines of code won't replicate GA. Try counting how many hits, and you will find that all the bots and spiders quickly make the numbers meaningless.
Of course, if that is all you are doing, you should be using Matamo or Fathom or whatever, but it is not fair to say GA could easily be replaced.
Many of the common web log analyzers are a bit long in the tooth.
I've have used GoAccess for a while now and is mostly happy with it. It's fast enough and can generate pretty good looking static html which is mostly what you want for those simple use cases.
A side effect of processing log files is that you can freely try software on historical data.
Do you have a recommendation on log format for GoAccess? I run a lot of custom services with no nginx etc in front, so I'll have to figure out the logging myself.
Just a shot in the dark, but if you use Cloudflare already, their stats include view counts. It's also probably more accurate than relying on JS tracking tools because they can count the actual requests to your site.
We put this down to people with JavaScript disabled or ad blockers. CF does filter bot traffic but will capture all hits as it’s tracking through network requests. For us it’s around a 35% increase in what GA reports.
I reckon you'd need more than 9 "\n" characters to get it done.
But in seriousness the 10 lines would be just use local storage or wotnot to store a tag, then call tracker.com?tag=... on each page load.
"Rest is done on the server (TM)"
I don't disagree, but in a bit of fairness, a lot of people just use GA for page-counts and basic correlation stuff...you could do that in a relatively small amount of frontend JS stuff and a slightly-more-complex backend API to handle the basic correlation stuff.
That said, that will only do about .01% of all the features of GA; like the infamous "FTP vs. Dropbox" the premise itself isn't exactly "wrong", just missing a bigger point.
Could you link me to the FTP vs. Dropbox discussion? I am curious. I haven't used either for years and the implication seems to be that there is a profound difference, so I wonder what it is.
Isn't it more expensive to launch a geostationary satellite? If their big thing is communication how are they going to compete with Starlink (which isn't geostationary btw)? How is it profitable for anyone to dream of competing with Starlink at this point. I am a layperson but it seems like game over unless Rocket Lab finds a way to compete.
The article only mentioned communications satelites and I don't think anyone is going able to beat Starlink in that area in the next 5-10 years.
You can't compete with Starlink from GEO, the latency to GEO is just too high - around 250ms - which is ok for some purposes but pretty crap compared to ground fiber or Starlink.
The article says they are market maker of satellite bandwidth, so they have data that their venture have paying customers. They mentioned that the purpose of the satellite is to augment bandwidth when needed and move to another location.
I earn $100,000 a year writing god awful code for a doomed software company. Am I contributing more to the public good than the restaurant worker who cooks my food, the guy who changes my car's oil, or the guy who hauls all of my garbage away?
You may not be, but it seems that your employer is already doomed and they won't be around for long unless they do something to contribute to society. That's generally what happens to those that don't contribute: doomed to fail in the long-run.
It doesn't really matter; the system works by everyone working for their benefit; and history consistently shows that it works better than alternates such as communism, where some powerful dude decides what's good for everyone (and will shoot you if you don't enthusiastically agree 100%)
So yeah, you make decent living by writing awful code, good for you. If you think you don't deserve it, feel free to overtip your waiter. The alternatives are much much worse.
Aren't you describing a dictatorship? In communism, the state owns things, but the state can be the people; i.e. democratic communism. Isn't communism just the absence of private property? (that is, everything is public property)
In my opinion this is just one symptom of the overall illness our society is suffering from. There's no unity among people. It's very much a materialistic society. Everyone thinks everything should be safe. The government has become the arbitrator for fucking every conflict which further prevents us from seeing the humanity in each other. And that's critical because there seems to be less humanity in us every year. The Injustice system is just an outgrowth of this madness.
What's missing is the context of the time when they were popular. They were new and had a high-tech aura about them.
Nowadays making a website doesn't differentiate you in a good way unless you have a super creative way of coming up with the website and a lot of content to fill it with.
Nowadays you have to take it to the next level. What's a skill that's beyond the reach of most people? This could be why PCB business cards are so appealing. Because it's a thing most people can't do and if you can do it it shows your technical prowess. I think that's my personal web pages were popular back then and why they won't ever be popular again.