After publishing on this site for the last two months I realized there is something I’m missing, basic stats.
It might be vanity, but I really do find it useful to know which pages are actually getting traffic and what content people seem to care about. This isn’t the type of blog that many people will read regularly, most of the traffic has always been from searching for a topic from a single post, but knowing what folks are looking for is still valuable.
I used to write almost entirely about WordPress. That’s no longer the case and I can see it in the stats. Tricks from turning off AI in VS Code and installing Node with the latest NPM are some of my most popular posts today and that’s helpful.
The catch is I haven’t been willing to install a stats product that either comes with a heavy cost monetarily or to your privacy. To get around that I’ve spent the last few weeks creating my own stats package and I’m pretty happy with the results.
I host this site with Cloudflare Workers. It’s good at static sites like this but it offers so much more. I decided to take advantage of that and use its analytics engine to build stats collecting a few things, all without JavaScript, cookies or beacons of any kind.
Today I’m collecting basic URL information and a few other items, such as country and referrer, that Cloudflare already had available. I then built my own dashboard to display it all (of course I updated the privacy policy to go with it). The data is minimal. I don’t even collect the full user agent or IP address, and it helps me see what people are going to and where they’re coming from.
While I have no intention of monetizing this site, knowing what content people actually care about is still important to me. I’m hoping these new stats can help me find motivation for better content as well as to improve some of the posts that already exist. Either way, though, I’m excited about it and had a lot of fun putting it together.