When I started building Jottings, I had a simple principle: respect your users. That sounds obvious, but it's actually radical in 2025. Most websites treat visitors like data points to be harvested, tracked across the internet, and sold to the highest bidder. I didn't want Jottings to be that kind of platform.

One of the first decisions I made was choosing how to track visitor analytics. And that's where Umami came in.

The Google Analytics Problem

Google Analytics is the elephant in the room—literally everywhere, tracking everything. It's powerful, free, and deeply integrated into how we think about web analytics. But there's a cost we don't usually talk about: your visitors' privacy.

Google Analytics uses cookies to track users across websites, build detailed profiles, and feed that data into Google's advertising ecosystem. Even if you're not selling user data, you're still collecting information that many people find uncomfortable. And if you have visitors in the EU? You need explicit consent before collecting any tracking data at all, thanks to GDPR.

When I looked at my analytics options, Google Analytics felt like bringing a massive industrial operation into Jottings—overkill, invasive, and fundamentally misaligned with the platform's values.

Enter Umami

I discovered Umami almost by accident. It's a lightweight, open-source analytics platform that does one thing really well: shows you how many people visit your site and what they do on it. Without cookies. Without storing personal data. Without selling anything to anyone.

Here's what makes Umami different:

No cookies. Umami uses a hash of your visitor's IP address and user agent to generate an anonymous identifier. It's created on-the-fly, never stored persistently, and can't be used to track you across other websites. This means you get aggregate analytics without the privacy violation.

GDPR compliant out of the box. Because Umami doesn't use cookies or store personal data, you don't need explicit consent to run it. That's huge if you have EU visitors. It's literally built to respect privacy regulations.

Lightweight. The Umami tracking script is tiny—about 2KB compared to Google Analytics' 40KB+. Your site loads faster. Your visitors' browsers work less hard. Everyone wins.

Simple, actually useful metrics. Umami shows you what matters: page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, referrers, device types, browsers. You don't get the temptation to obsess over custom events and funnels. Sometimes simple is better.

Owned, not rented. Umami is open-source. I can self-host it, review the code, and know exactly what it's doing with data. I'm not dependent on a corporation's free tier or worried about feature deprecation.

The Trade-Offs (And Why They're Worth It)

Umami isn't Google Analytics. It can't do things like cross-domain tracking or build detailed behavioral profiles. You won't get machine learning recommendations or audience segments based on purchase history.

But here's the thing—I don't need those things. And more importantly, I don't want to collect the data they require.

For Jottings, I want to know:

• Are people finding the site?
• What pages do they visit?
• Where are they coming from?
• Are they using mobile or desktop?

That's it. Those metrics tell me whether people are interested, what content resonates, and where to focus my marketing. Everything else is noise.

The Real Cost of "Free"

This is worth saying clearly: Google Analytics is free because you are the product. Google isn't paying to build and operate analytics infrastructure out of generosity. They're doing it because the data you collect—and they can see—is valuable for their advertising business.

When you choose a privacy-first alternative like Umami, you're choosing to not participate in that extraction. You're saying your visitors' data isn't yours to monetize.

Some people ask me: "But don't you want to grow Jottings?" Of course I do. I'm ambitious about building something great. But I want to grow by making the platform better, not by convincing people their privacy is a fair price for free analytics.

How We're Using It

For Jottings, we're tracking basic metrics on the landing page and dashboard. We see which blog posts get the most traffic, what devices people use, whether our SEO is working. The data helps us make better decisions without needing to know anything personal about who's visiting.

When you use Jottings to publish your own site, you get the same Umami integration if you want it. No tracking scripts, no cookies, no privacy concerns. Just the analytics you actually need.

The Bigger Picture

Choosing Umami is a small technical decision with a bigger philosophical implication. It says that we believe privacy isn't a feature to be negotiated—it's a right to be protected.

There are more privacy-first tools popping up every year: Fathom Analytics, Plausible, Simple Analytics, and others. The fact that alternatives exist is good. It means the market is starting to reject the idea that "free" is worth your visitors' privacy.

If you're building something online, I'd encourage you to look at what you're tracking and why. Do you actually need to know if Sarah visited your site on Tuesday from an iPhone? Or do you just need to know how many people are visiting and what they're interested in?

The latter is enough. And it's more honest.

Give Jottings a Try

If you're building a personal site or microblog, Jottings gives you the same philosophy: owned by you, not extracted from you. No trackers beyond basic analytics. No dark patterns. No data sold to advertisers.

We think you'll like that approach. And if you do, I'd love to hear about it.

Start building at jottings.me.