I added JS code to this blog

When I started this version of my blog a couple of years ago, my goal was simple. Provide minimal blog functionality with a focus on privacy. I did have strict no on any JS code and was using templates that do satisfy that. Then I forked one and wrote my own template that is being used here.

I host it on GitHub Pages, so I don’t have server side statistics about blog visitors which is good. But recently I wanted to know how many people are visiting my blog and what posts are popular. I don’t want to use any third party service that collects data about visitors. So I wrote a simple JS script that collects data about visits and sends it to a server I control. I self-hosted a umami instance for this purpose.

So the script is simple, I just added the following to header as the first JS code.

<script defer src="https://uma.melashri.eu.org/script.js" data-website-id="e5861151-2de1-428d-a661-10a9abdda01a"></script>

I understand that people will be concerned about privacy, so I made sure that the solution does not store any PII and that I’m in no way have access to this information so it is just basic information about visits and page views.

Feel free to add it to your ad blocker if you want to block it. I would probably do it myself. If you are using uBlock Origin (and you should) you can add the following filter:

||uma.melashri.eu.org^

I will see if I will keep this or will remove it if I find it not useful which is the most probable outcome.