Regular visitors to my blog might have noticed that it looked a bit different yesterday. The reason was that I had briefly switched my blogging system from Ghost to WordPress. Firstly, I wanted to see if a migration was possible. Secondly, I was annoyed that Ghost doesn’t have integrated visitor statistics. For WordPress, there’s a privacy-friendly plugin for this called WP-Statistics. With Ghost, you have to rely on external solutions.

However, after just a few minutes, I realized that I’ve grown accustomed to Ghost’s simple and modern interface, and WordPress feels more like a step backward. Even the new WordPress editor is less intuitive to use than Ghost’s editor. I also love Ghost’s focus on memberships, something that is complicated to achieve in WordPress and requires plugins. The only thing left is the lack of visitor statistics in Ghost, which I do miss.

My research shows that the clear recommendation is to use an external provider. This is hardly surprising, as many Ghost users probably run their blog through the official hosting service and are used to paying for the service. However, I run the blog on my own server, partly for data privacy reasons. So, paying an external service at least 9 euros a month to give them information about you was not an option for me. Nor was using Google Analytics, which is rightly blocked by many. Even though it’s free, Google doesn’t need data from my pages too.

Then I remembered that many years ago I used the open-source Piwik. Now renamed Matomo, a name just as meaningless as Piwik, you can opt for a cloud solution for a fee. Or, like me, host the whole thing yourself, with no monthly fee. If only I had configured and generated the SSL certificate correctly from the start, I wouldn’t have spent two hours troubleshooting. But now it’s running.

What does this mean for you? Nothing, really. The blog will continue to exist (and I plan for it to become more active), but now I can see more than just the five people who have subscribed to the newsletter. But don’t worry: The data is collected and stored locally on my server, completely anonymized. I can see which page you visit and for how long, what device you use, and where you come from (very roughly, it placed me in Bern instead of Zurich).

This way, your data is protected, and I get a few numbers. Nevertheless, I would be happy if you also subscribed to the newsletter.