Building My Own Analytics With Express and React

The Why

You may be asking yourself why even bother, when you can just add a Google Analytics tracking script and call it a day. And that's fair enough. But there's a few reasons that GA doesn't seem like the right tool for me.

• You have to put in a fairly hefty privacy policy. I see companies neglect this all the time, but I'm not about that life. Right now, I'm not doing anything that requires a privacy policy, and I don't want to add one just for this.
• Google Analytics is waaaay too much hammer for my nail.
  • I don't need the dashboard that GA provides. All I want is a couple graphs. It's such overkill to do that it's not even worth it
• I want to make my own analytics as an exercise
• It's a good excuse to start making a prettier back end experience for myself
  • If you've ever heard the saying "The cobbler's children have no shoes," I am the cobbler and the child, and my current admin dashboard is as bare bones as can be. I'd like to spruce it up for fun and practice.
• I'm trying to get over the hesitation to add content when there's so much out there.
  • It's a publish-or-perish world out there, like it or not, and some of the most useful pieces I've ever read have come from personal sites instead of large company blogs or content aggregators.