No more spying: Why I’m ditching analytics here

On January 3, 2011, my stat tracker broke. I don’t know what the problem was, but I was too lazy to find out. Eventually, I gave up.

As of today, I’m dumping the whole thing.

This means you can freely browse the site, MarshallJonesJr.com, without me spying on you or tracking what you do. You can even invite your friends to join you. I won’t have any idea how many people visit, how long they stay, or where they go afterward.

Until now, I’ve been a big fan of the website tracking tools available to people like me for free. I think it’s awesome that we can track so much without paying anything. I like using what I learn from these tools to give visitors a better experience. The stats even help me change the site to guide visitors to do what I want them to do.

Most of all, though, I like spying. Or liked spying.

Last year, I did roughly the same thing I’ve done over these past few weeks: my tracker broke, and I didn’t fix it. But after I wrote about how liberated I felt back then, I signed back up. I made it a point not to pay as much attention, but of course I still did.

So this time, it’s gone completely.

The Marshallosophy behind this site is that I don’t care what visitors think. Sure, I still appreciate it when you like what I write. I just don’t want that to influence what I say. Not here anyway. Here, I share what I want, to understand what I’m thinking.

So, to answer the question, I’m ditching analytics because I don’t think I want to write or edit or live by numbers, at least not on MarshallJonesJr.com.