Rolling without Google Analytics…

I use the Ghost platform, hosted by the developers of Ghost, ghost.org, for this blog. If you’re not already familiar with Ghost, it’s a relatively new blogging platform that’s being built to get back to the basics of what a blog platform should be all about, rather than a full content management system, like the most popular blog platform, WordPress, has become over the years.

Ghost has been great for me, as it meets my need for a simple, easy to use, writing platform. What’s also helpful for me is that it doesn’t have too many bells and whistles to distract me from writing. The theme, which basically gives the blog its look and feel, I have been using is the Vapor Theme, by Seth Lilly. The theme has been great for me, since what I need right now is a simple theme that highlights written content. Seth’s been really responsive along the way to questions and small fix requests.

Ghost upgraded their hosted sites a couple of days ago, without any advance warning. While it added some great new features, it broke the Vapor and some other themes. If you visited this blog on Wednesday, you may have experienced it in a strange format, which is what happened when the theme broke. Seth’s on it and I’m confident a new version of the Vapor Theme will be available very soon. I rolled-back to the Ghost default theme, Casper, for now.

One benefit of this disruption is that I’m not using Google Analytics right now to track the number of visitors to the blog. Since I started writing for this blog, I’ve been trying to resist the urge to compulsively track traffic to the blog. Despite my best efforts, I’ve had trouble doing this and have found myself sneaking a quick peek multiple times throughout the day. Because it takes an extra step or two to enable Google Analytics to track traffic, I’ve decided to give it a rest for now, at least until the new Vapor Theme is ready. I was again partly inspired to do this by a Zen Habits post, “How I Conduct My Business”, particularly #10 in the List.

I’m not sure why I was checking the stats so much and why it was so difficult for me to resist the urge to check them. I think it was partially fueled by the constant desire I have to feel like forward progress is being made. I think another contributor is the desire to feel like I’m connecting with people throughout the day and this blog is one tool to do that. I’m starting to learn that the former may not be as important as I think it should be, while the latter may be more important that I gave it credit for in the past.

For now, I’m happy to be rolling without Google Analytics. There is, however, a basic counter available at ghost.org that shows a total page view count. I think I’ll start by at least trying to ignore that for now too, then see if I can apply the same discipline to Google Analytics, once it’s up-and-running again.