Happy New Year 2024

Statistics for 2023

2023 saw 436k (436,000) page views as reported by Google Analytics! This was up from 384k last year, an increase of 52k or 14%.

I discovered that many ad blockers also block Google Analytics, so this figure is likely less than the true value, given many people visiting this site will be software/electrical engineers who will use ad blockers. In an attempt to get a more realistic number, I paid for a month of Netlify’s analytics service which can’t be blocked in the same way as it’s working on the server side when requests are made (I use Netlify to host this blog). Netlify reported 729k visitors in just 1 month!?! Is this is to be believed that is approx. 8.7M visitors a year. This seems too high, so maybe it’s also recording a lot of bots? The true value might be someone between the two?

At the end of 2023 the site had 639k words, up from 604k words last year (an increase of 35k). These words were spread over 1221 pages, and included 4,518 images (an increase of 199 from 4,319 images last year).

Most Popular Pages

The top 10 most popular pages, ranked by number of page views:

Programming related pages again took the top spots. I’m not sure what “(not set)” is, this wasn’t here last year!

Acquisition

As usual, most of the traffic was from organic search (e.g. Google search engine).

Donations

I received NZD$59 worth of donations through my Ko-Fi page from this blog, NinjaCalc and NinjaTerm this year. Some kind folk donated NZ$3 a month, and there were two one-off donations of $15 and $20.

Achievements in 2023

• Asciidoc pages have been fully phased out.
• NinjaTerm was fixed up and turned into a PWA.
• Finally, the end of the year saw the blog get a dark mode!

Plans For The 2024 Year

• More content, and improving existing content: As always!
• Add the ability to do a site wide search: I’m thinking I’ll write a frontend along with using pagefind for this. I feel like this is a better approach than using Algolia, which is a paid for (although they do give out open-source licenses if you contact them) third party search service. Mostly because I will not depend on the 3rd party, the search index can be built at compile time and then the searching done by the client browser.