Is it time to switch back to access logs for measuring site use / popularity?
What proportion of browsing is invisible? I still use Google Analytics to see whether my blog posts are being seen, but I am curious about whether access logs would give a more accurate indication - given the prevalence of browsers and browser plugins that actively resist tracking by Javascript etc. Back in the early 2000s the company that I was working for at the time offered website hosting as a service, where a reasonable amount of the billing was tied to the volume of traffic being served by each site. Back then we didn't have microservices scattered across multiple ephemeral virtual servers, so generating a monthly report was generally a straight-forward matter of having software configured to point at a particular directory and run a scheduled job to parse the contents of access log files. Since I have recently come to the realisation that the Blogger platform that my blog posts are hosted and served out from is not particularly useful when it comes to being indexed by Google...