A few months ago, I started working on my own analytics service for my blog. I did this for many reasons, but ultimately for control and user privacy.

I only actually ever store four pieces of data:

• Website Title
• URL
• Referral URL (Only if it’s been given)
• Date Accessed

So while there’s not much data there, I can track everything I need, so like visits per day, per post, and I can get an idea of where traffic is coming from.

There have been occasions where the service, which I named “Minilytics”, has gone down though, so I can’t say I’ve tracked all the visits. But I’ve got a few things to share.

Performance

I made nice SQL query that shows me the performance of the site for each day. I use the view count for that day, and run it through a few conditions that will then output a string that I’ve manually set up. It’s not as exact as viewing the view count, but much easier to visualise.

Monthly View Count

Again, this isn’t totally accurate as these numbers may be higher and it hasn’t tracked them. But this simple count of views from each month, is a good way to check the general increase/decrease in visits over time.

I’m going to try writing some more queries soon, and see what other insights I can pull from the data. But overall I think the site has been getting a lot more traffic recently! Especially since I moved the blog over to WordPress a few days ago. My guess is that the WordPress installation has better meta tags, descriptions, and stuff that search engines like.