Ana

Ana is a lightweight not-so-fancy analytics tool that will create 1 file per day. Each daily file contains the following information about your visitors:

1. Timestamp
2. URL visited
3. Title of the page visited
4. User-agent (i.e. the browser or bot used)

Another nice thing is that each line in the file is comma separated which means you could technically import it into Excel, if you really wanted to or even a database, if you really wanted to fill that up.

Installation

1. Download ana.js and nia.php
2. Open each file to change domain names, locations of saved log files etc. as you wish. No limits!
3. Place both files in your root directory of your website
4. Call the ana.js in your HTML with a regular script tag for Javascript (your should know how to do that if you've gotten this far)
5. Check the logs created in you folder structure

Adaptable parameters

in ana.js change this to your domain and location of the file

fetch('https://your-domain.com/nia.php',

in nia.php

header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://your-domain.com"); // can be a * or it can be a domain name. Your choice

$logDir = __DIR__ . "/ana/lytics"; // can be anything you want it to be. 100% flexible
$logFile = $logDir . "/" . date("Y-m-d") . ".ana";  // use any .blob file format you like

Example log file

Taken from a real life implentation of the script, but urls have been changed. That specific original file is 3673 lines big (each line representing a view of a page). The more visitors you have the larger the saved file.

2025-03-13T09:00:00.012Z, https://domain-name.com/tag/lamborghini, Lamborghini - Fictional Car Magazine, Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/133.0.6943.141 Safari/537.36

2025-03-13T09:01:28.502Z, https://domain-name.com/adidas-originals-by-hyke, Adidas Originals by HYKE - Fictional Fashion Magazine, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0

Benefits

For one its simple, fast and does not require much work. Once its deployed it does its thing and it does it really well. The log files can be a little big, like 500kb or more depending on traffic, but can easily be managed and even deleted if you are worried about running out of space. The second thing is that you are not dependant on Google Analytics or alike to log the data, this script is logging everything and it does rather good.

Drawbacks

None apart from the fact I will not further develop it since it fits my use case, but be free to fork it, bork it or mess around with it and change it as you like.

About the Author

Mathias Haegglund - Code Collector, Globetrotter, and Occasional Gamer.