Scribbles Analytics

For anyone following my work over the past years you probably know that I've built my own analytics service, Tinylytics. Over the years, in Scribbles, you could easily copy in your embed script and it would track visitors and also allow for Kudos (think "Likes") on posts. That was followed by surfacing this data straight in the admin — which uses some in-house back and forth between Scribbles and Tinylytics. It worked great (just didn't look it).

At the same time, this caused friction — not just from trying to embed the script and finding it, but also confusion why you'd need both subscription. This is fair and I tried to address this and find some sort of balance. However as time went, I wanted something built in, without adding unnecessary complexity.

So, powered by a new product within Tinylytics (because why not), I am happy to announce that Scribbles Analytics is now built in for any blog that wants to use it. And it's very pretty.

When you create a new blog, you'll be offered to enable it there and then — or just keep it off, really up to you. Scribbles will take care of everything and no external script is loaded — even on your own custom domains.

Out the box, it handles everything you should be used to from Tinylytics, without separate accounts. In addition to this, it's designed to be easy to use, set up once, and then don't worry about it.

It is minimal on purpose, it'll track visits and kudos — that's it. No need to take over the whole admin UI in an ugly graph and paths and what-not. Nothing verbose or ugly.

If you want to dive in deeper, you can always load up the "Details" and see a bigger graph, paths and countries.

For analytics on your actual posts, you'll see a simple pill in the header with total count and kudos. Clicking this will show you a graph for the past 30 days if you wanted.

Back in May I launched direct integration with Tinylytics and this built on top of this — as it was clearly my end goal.

Behind the scenes Scribbles talks to Tinylytics, so you get the same privacy friendly, no cookie tracking that is important to me.

It's included with Scribbles Unlimited and Lifetime at no extra cost and is supposed to be a simple and easy way to complement your writing, without having to manage another analytics account.

And if for some reason you decide it's not for you, you can disable it at any time — and even delete all that data when you want.

Oh and if you ever need something more powerful, well, you know which service I recommend for that. 😋 And the charts look the same now too — so double yummy.

Hope you like it.

✌️❤️

— Vincent

P.S. I am still sort of working on this, so if you see any issues or have suggestions, please let me know.