Measuring ReRead's Growth - Tech Blog
20th August 2024
I currently have no clue how much traction the
ReRead website is getting. I need to
know this if I am to have any hope of understanding how ReRead is doing
and if it is growing.
ReRead's website is hosted on a free
plan (Cloudflare Pages for
anyone interested - been amazing so far!). As far as I am aware I have
two ways to do this:
-
Host the website on my home network instead of on Cloudflare -
probably on a Raspberry Pi with port forwarding and an
Apache HTTP Server. This way I
think I’d be able to monitor the traffic hitting the server directly.
My home internet is provided by Virgin Media. I currently just got a
20.2 Mbps upload speed which I think is easily enough to host what is
currently a very simple website. The only other small complication is
that I’m not sure my IP address will stay constant. If I tell
Cloudflare (my domain service provider) to point
re-read.co.uk to my public IP
address, let’s say it’s 8.8.8.8 - great the website works. But then
tomorrow, my public IP lease expires and Virgin Media decides to
change my public IP to 8.8.4.4 - the website goes down, because it’s
no longer at 8.8.8.8. It looks like
Virgin Media do offer static public IP addresses, but you need to be on a business account and tell them at time of
setup - this is not viable. However, on further reading it looks like
Dynamic DNS is
my solution, I would be able to run a script on the Raspberry Pi to
monitor my public IP address and then tap into the
Cloudflare API
to change the IP address
re-read.co.uk points to. So the
Raspberry Pi would see the change in IP address and tell Cloudflare
the new IP address. It also looks like someone has already written
this script so it would be as simple as installing a package -
ddclient! This is a
very possible solution. The positives to this self hosting method are
that it should be easy to get a database (SQL type thing) running on
the Pi and it would all just “be there” for me to setup. The downside
may be - I have all this raw data from the server and I have to work
out how to process it - I could spend all my days making graphs and
fiddling with things..
-
Work out how to use something like
Google Analytics
(it sounds mildly privacy invading - privacy will be a core foundation
to ReRead) or something like
Plausible which is open source and
might be nicer? I believe these are just lines of Javascript that are
added to each page and pings Google’s servers?
Yes, that’s pretty much it . Google Analytics looks to be free at the volumes I’m looking at for
now. I’ve just stumbled across
Cloudflare data analytics, it’s free and advocates for privacy first - I am falling in love
with Cloudflare. This means ReRead's website would be hosted on
Cloudflare, the
re-read.co.uk domain (DNS magic)
managed by Cloudflare, and data analytics also managed by Cloudflare.
Almost fully Cloudflare, apart from one thing, it's actually
Apple/iCloud hosting the email server
for @re-read.co.uk as it was included for free in my iCloud plan!
The solution I’m going to go with is Cloudflare for data analytics, one
day I’d like to be able to have a view counter on my blog posts - maybe
Cloudflare will make a view counter possible! This means, once I’ve
integrated it, I will be able to see how many people view the ReRead
website, and I can test what gets people interested and onto the site.
