Inexplicably, for the longest time I was reticent to enable any sort of analytics on my personal site. Partially because, to be honest, it’s not as if my blog is well read (or so I assume, but soon I’ll have numbers to back that claim up). As I try to get more involved in the world, I’ve found my site is useful as a portfolio of sorts - not so much in the way of “look at my sexy site” as “here’s the cool things I do”. I’ve noticed that GitHub has had some DDoS issues lately, and as I host this site on my GitHub pages, I wanted to minimise any potential downtimes. I’d also noticed that some of my pages were a bit on the slow side to load, as Octopress appears to load quite a bit of javascript. I admit to being a fan of many of the asides, and to have written some of my own.
In order to improve this situation, I took two steps:
- I enabled Google Analytics: while I’m not a particular fan of feeding the privacy black hole with even more data, it appears to be the only viable option at this time. I have been eyeing Mint, but I am abstaining from purchasing anything new until I leave the Netherlands (in a little over a week) just to stay on the safe side of my bank account. (30 USD may not sound like much, but that’s about two days worth of döner or shawarma for dinner.)
- I set up the site on CloudFlare.
What I didn’t realise is that several of my older posts actually rank high on Google’s search results; however, the link on Google points to the old url from when I was using blazeblogger. Because the content is actually useful documentation, I was able to set up redirects so that the page is back online and people can use the information now.