what i learned about referrers building a cookieless analytics tool
i'm om yaduvanshi. i'm 18, an applied ai developer, and i built cloudline, a cookieless google analytics alternative. one script tag, under 2 KB, no cookies, no stored ips. what a pageview stores four things:
i'm om yaduvanshi. i'm 18, an applied ai developer, and i built cloudline, a cookieless google analytics alternative. one script tag, under 2 KB, no cookies, no stored ips.
what a pageview stores
four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. that's it. device type comes from screen width. no fingerprinting.
what i got wrong
i treated referrer as solid data. yesterday someone corrected me. referrer is best-effort. browsers strip or reduce it based on referrer-policy. https to http drops it completely.
he was right, and it changed how i think about the data. three fields are measured by my own script, so i trust them. referrer is a hint. when it shows up, it's the only free read on where a visit came from.
why this matters
if you're building analytics, know which fields you measure and which ones you receive. measured fields you can trust. received fields get an asterisk.
cloudline is free for early users while i keep building it.
— om yaduvanshi
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.