Exporting the data as CSV or JSON

There is a link on the statistics page marked CSV, and next to it one marked JSON. Both hand the numbers over as a file. No account, no request form, no waiting for an email with a download link in it.

This post is mostly about why that link is there at all.

What comes out

CSV gives one row per day with four columns — date, hits, unique visitors, and bots. It opens in any spreadsheet without anything having to be configured, which is the entire point of choosing that format.

JSON gives the same daily figures plus the breakdowns: countries, cities, browsers, screen sizes, and the most-visited pages, along with a note of when the file was generated and which period it covers.

Both accept a period. Add &days=90 for three months, or anything up to 400 — the same window the statistics themselves are kept for. Without it the file covers the last 30 days.

It is a plain address

The export is an ordinary URL, which means it can be fetched by anything that can fetch a URL. For numbers pulled into a spreadsheet once a week, or a small script that keeps its own archive going back further than 400 days, nothing here is in the way and no key is required.

That is deliberate. A download button that only works when a human clicks it in a browser is a download button designed to be used once.

What it does not contain

Worth being straight about: this is the same data the statistics page already shows. There is no richer hidden layer being unlocked. The export exists so the data is portable, not so it is more complete.

In particular there is nothing per-visitor in it, because nothing per-visitor is kept. The daily hash that tells repeat visits apart is deleted after two days and is not in the file. What the export contains is what exists: counts, grouped.

Why bother

Because leaving has to be possible.

A service that holds a history hostage is not keeping its users through quality, it is keeping them through the cost of starting over. That is a poor reason for anyone to stay, and an even poorer thing to build deliberately.

Visitor history belongs to whoever collected it. Taking it elsewhere is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and the tooling for it should not be the worst-maintained part of the site.