I just signed up for Google Analytics and installed the code, but only on the home page, which many (most?) regular readers never see. Among other things, it downloads a 17K (!) chunk of JavaScript. I’ll report back on whether it does anything useful, and if so, will consider deploying it on more pages. I currently have a pretty rich set of Perl scripts that tell me a lot of useful stuff, but there’s certainly more to know. I don’t think they claim to do anything to track the people who read this via RSS/Atom, which means that it will become less useful with time until they address that, which I’m not sure is possible. I write this because my more paranoid readers (and there’s no doubt about it, they are out to get you) will probably object to having Google track what they read, so now is the time to start cooking up Analytics-blocking GreaseMonkey scripts, or equivalent. [OK, it’s working now, I was fooled by the fact that it’s broken in Safari. So I republished the whole site with Analytics turned on, and I’ll publish the pretty graphs next Sunday after it’s had a week to run.]
