tinylytics kudos

first off: happy new year, reader! hope we all have as peaceful and calm a year as possible.

i was reading a post in my RSS reader, from tracy durnell's blog (love that site, very inspirational), in which she discusses potential methods for indie web people to reduce friction and make things more welcoming. i do have my own problems with the notion of 'indie web' but that's neither here nor there. in the post she mentions/proposes simple interactions, little ways for readers to leave a notice of sorts that they've visited; a way to give kudos. and two options listed were the open heart protocol, and tinylytics' kudos feature.

first i tried open heart protocol, but i couldn't seem to get their API endpoint to work for me. the button did seem to work though. but curling the API endpoints and stuff didn't give me anything useful. so i moved onto tinylytics.

i just want to say, the analytics that tinylytics brings are entirely anonymized, and really it's just kind of a private hit counter. so i am not collecting any data. and i don't really want to be! i just added it for the cute kudos button really. i added the provided script tag to my application.html.erb file, like a sicko, then added the kudos button to each blog post -- the kudos are represented by a whale emoji because it's cute as fuck.

so far i love it! sure yeah it counts ANYTHING as a hit, i noticed my refreshes were counted, but i'm not looking at that anyway. and i don't care if people spam kudos (if anyone reading this even cares enough) or if my own kudos hits count. just seeing the little button makes me smile -- that the option is there :)