What Changed
This year I made some changes to the infrastructure and analytics used on marquinsmith.com .
Digital Ocean, who I use to host this WordPress website have increased there memory and storage sizes for equivalent sized Droplets. This meant that I could get the same server specification for a cheaper price each month to run the website on.
In terms of analytics I switched from self hosted Matomo, to self hosted Umami. While both of these web analytics tools are privacy focussed I just didn’t need all the advanced reporting and capabilities that Matomo offered.
When I originally set up this website I manually installed WordPress on the server, then manually installed Piwik (now Matomo) on the same server. This was a bit tricky to do at the time and I am sure by now all memory of the steps have been purged from my memory. To make things easier for myself I took advantage of the Digital Ocean “1 click” setup of a server with WordPress already installed.
Not wanting to break this WordPress server by trying to also install Matomo on it, I now needed another option for self hosting my analytics tool. Enter CapRover! CapRover is a tool that vastly simplifies the app deployment process that uses Docker under the hood. What this unlocks is the ability to easily run multiple apps on a single server. Alternatives in this space include YunoHost and Sandstorm.
Again, for simplicity I used the Digital Ocean “1 click” setup of a server with CapRover already installed. With Caprover installed I used the “One click app” functionality in Caprover to setup and run the Countly, Plausible and Umami apps. After comparing the 3 of them I decided to go with Umami.
What happened (from an analytics perspective)
Since July 2024 I have made an effort to blog more. This has been rewarded with an upward trend in page views and visitors.
Search engines have provided the bulk of the traffic. With Google (unsurprisingly) driving most of this.
In terms of content, the most popular posts are related to streamlit, followed by a post on flask. Looks like python web apps is a popular topic out there!