View analytics — know who opened your document

[kobzevvv]

Problem

You send a proposal to a potential client. Silence. Did they open it? Did they read it? Did the link even work? You wait three days, then send a follow-up that feels awkward because you have no idea what happened.

Solution

Optional lightweight analytics for published pages.

npx instant-publish deploy proposal.html --slug acme-proposal --track
# Published: https://chillai.space/p/acme-proposal (tracking enabled)

npx instant-publish stats acme-proposal
#   Views: 12
#   Unique: 3
#   First opened: Feb 22, 2026 14:32 UTC
#   Last opened: Feb 23, 2026 09:15 UTC
#   Avg. time on page: 4m 12s

No cookies, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts. Just edge-level request counting via Cloudflare.

Use cases

• Sales proposals — know when the prospect opened it, follow up at the right time
• Job applications — confirm the hiring manager actually saw your portfolio
• Client deliverables — "I sent it last Tuesday" now comes with proof
• Content sharing — see if your report actually gets read or just bookmarked

Implementation ideas

• Count views at the edge (Cloudflare Worker increments a KV counter)
• Store: views:{slug}:{date} → count (daily granularity)
• No PII collected — just view count, timestamp, rough geo (country from CF headers)
• CLI: npx instant-publish stats <slug> shows the dashboard in terminal
• Optional: webhook ping on first view ("Your proposal was just opened")

Privacy-first

• No cookies, no fingerprinting, no IP logging
• Only aggregate counts and timestamps
• Author sees "3 unique views from 2 countries" — not individual identities
• Readers see no tracking notice because there's nothing invasive to disclose