Introduction

Click here to just get to the point.

I want to know if anyone is actually visiting this site. I’m not selling anything or trying to turn my blog into some alternative revenue stream (how silly of me, I know). I just want to know if I’m getting visitors, and maybe a couple of other things related to the content I put up. To accomplish this, I need some sort of analytics solution.

This site is built using Jekyll and its default theme Minima. There are various plugins and themes that can hook into 3rd-party analytics, but installing a dependency or swapping themes just to get a script tag included on my site’s pages seemed way too over the top. It would also just be another thing to break and give me headaches later on.

In this post, I’ll walk through a straightforward approach to setting up analytics on your Jekyll blog using the default Minima theme using Plausible.

Why Plausible

Disclaimer: I don’t have any relationship with Plausible other than being a user of their product at the time of this writing.

The need for a third-party analytics tool comes from the fact that this site is hosted using GitHub Pages. I don’t have access to any traffic data like I would if I were hosting everything myself.

Conventional wisdom says to slap some BigBrother Analytics onto your site and call it a day. I don’t like that approach. The internet is full of posts about problems with those tools, so I’ll spare you that rant. I just want to answer a few basic questions about whether anyone is actually reading this site, and maybe if there are some types of posts generating more views than others – no need to hand over any data to adtech in the process.

I decided to try out Plausible because I’ve heard and read a lot of good things about their “less creepy” approach to analytics. It seems to support my use case without feeding visitor data into the adtech meat grinder, so it felt worth giving them a shot.

Dependencies

My gem setup is pretty barebones as of this writing:

  • github-pages v232
  • minima v2.5.1

Getting Everything Setup

I’m not going to go into getting the site setup on GitHub pages here, GitHub has guides for that. This assumes you’ve already gone through those.

tldr;

  1. Register your site with Plausible
  2. Follow the wizard to obtain the script tag for later
  3. Copy the _includes/head.html file from the Minima theme to _includes/head.html in your Jekyll site directory
  4. Add the Plausible script tag to the copied file
  5. Deploy
  6. Follow the instructions in Plausible to check your site

That’s it. I’ll go into details on points 3 & 4 since those are the most involved.

Copying & Configuring _config/head.html

v3 of Minima will support a _includes/custom-head.html file, but that hasn’t been released yet. For v2.5.x, the way to customize the head section is to copy the _includes/head.html file from the theme. This process is described in the customization instructions for the 2.5-stable branch. You can find the file here.

That file looks something like this:

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  {%- seo -%}
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ "/assets/main.css" | relative_url }}">
  {%- feed_meta -%}
  {%- if jekyll.environment == 'production' and site.google_analytics -%}
    {%- include google-analytics.html -%}
  {%- endif -%}
</head>

You’ll notice that by default it includes some Google Analytics stuff. Since we’re not using that, remove it and replace it with your Plausible script tag. Your modified file should look like this:

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  {%- seo -%}
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ "/assets/main.css" | relative_url }}">
  {%- feed_meta -%}
  {%- if jekyll.environment == 'production' -%}
    <script defer data-domain="blog.antfeedr.com" src="https://plausible.io/js/script.js"></script>
  {%- endif -%}
</head>

Closing Remarks

That’s it! When Minima v3 is released, the only upgrade step you’ll need to take, other than updating the gem for the theme, is to switch your setup to use _includes/custom-head.html instead of _includes/head.html. No need to use any extra Jekyll plugins or special themes.

✌️