Data

The Analytics of This Site

  • 2060 words
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I collect some anonymous analytics on Vale.Rocks. Not because I feel the need to spy on my users every move, but rather because I quite enjoy nerding out about statistics. I love being able to see what country people are showing up from, what devices they’re using, and their browsers. Being able to see view counts tick up also helps my motivation.1

I also find it endlessly interesting to go have a look at where people are finding my site. Sometimes I’ll find that one of my posts has ended up in some obscure non-English newsletter or, at other times, on some niche forum straight out of the last century. It’s lovely being able to go down little rabbit holes inspecting such cases and to jump into discussions across the net.

As I find work as a writer, being able to point to my website and cite view counts can be beneficial, though is a byproduct of my stat tracking rather than the reason I do it.

My analytics tool of choice, GoatCounter, collects referrers, browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, locations, and languages. It is also blocked by every ad/content blocker I’ve tested. It wouldn’t be difficult to skirt around this, but I don’t want to. If people have made the (presumably informed) decision to block advertisements and tracking scripts, I wish to respect that decision. Yes, it will skew the data, but that is a price I’m willing to pay. I value my visitors decisions and autonomy.

Notes

My readership is not representative of a general audience. As a byproduct of my chosen topics and most popular writings, my readership is largely technical. This is manifested in the data in multiple ways.

As of August 2026, statcounter’s Browser Market Share Worldwide data places Chrome at 69.28%, Edge at 5.39%, Safari at 15.92%, and Firefox at 2.98% market share. Vale.Rocks is at contrast to this with Chrome and Edge at 55%, Safari at 33%, and Firefox at 11%. Given that Firefox still supports Manifest v2, it is the natural choice for adblockers. As such, it may actually be under-represented in this data.

Going off the figure that 29.5% of people globally use adblockers as of quarter 2, 2025, (a figure which might be conservative), my statistics are possibly 30% or more larger. Though it is likely even higher due to my technical audience, which is more likely to use adblockers and block tracking.

Plausible claims that, overall, 58% of people in tech-savy audiences block Google Analytics. They consider tech-savvy audiences to mainly be Hacker News readers and Reddit users – two of my biggest referrers. They claim that 88% of Firefox users block Google Analytics, and 82% of Linux users do as well, which are both already over-represented in my data.

GoatCounter reports macOS as the most used operating system (28%), followed by iOS (26%), then Windows (21%), then Android (18%), then Linux (7%). MacOS and Linux are represented more than they are generally, but I would expect that from a technical audience. It also seems twisted people occasionally tune in from Windows Phones and game consoles. The latter primarily due to my writing on the topic.

This all likely leads to under-representing what is already over-represented in my analytics – at least as compared to a more general, less niche audience. If you’d like to attempt to extrapolate the actual values based on the above notes, you’re welcome to, but I’ll be presenting the data values as they come from GoatCounter even though that under-represents figures due to the reasons discussed above.

By a sizable margin (~80%), most site visitors speak English, as you’d expect from a website written in English. This tends to be followed by German at around the 3-4% mark and then French and Spanish. Beyond that, there is too much flux and numbers get too small to be of much note.

As you’d expect based on languages, Western countries are the biggest readers. The United States of America is in the lead at 34%. I’d assume this is in no small part due to Hacker News. The United Kingdom follows at 9% with Germany close behind at 7%. This is followed by Canada, India, the Netherlands, France, and Australia, all at 3-4%. I’d also like to extend a greeting to my small readership of tax evaders in the Cayman Islands.

In the below lists of top referrers, alternate front-end are not counted. To keep track is too complex and never a complete task. As an example, there are a lot of Hacker News front-ends. A lot.

2026

Quarter 1

For the quarter running from 01/01/2026 through 31/03/2026.

Curious about content blocking numbers, I thought to compare the number reported by Google Search Console to the number reported by GoatCounter during this period. Search Console reported 1,320 clicks from Google, and GoatCounter reported 1,269 visits from Google. Alas, this actually isn’t very useful data, as there is too much at play and it is too limited.

Total hits during this period: 16,067

Most popular pages:

  1. My Opinionated CSS Reset - 3,250 hits
  2. The Death of Character in Game Console Interfaces - 2,457 hits
  3. Portfolio - 1,722 hits
  4. Landing - 1,641 hits
  5. You Can’t Opt-Out of Accessibility - 999 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Unknown - 5,895 hits
  2. Google - 1,269 hits
  3. GitHub - 1,156 hits
  4. Bluesky - 592 hits
  5. The Index - 586 hits

Quarter 2

For the quarter running from 01/04/2026 through 30/06/2026.

First time seeing a significant number of hits from YouTube (402 in total). Mostly from Kevin Powell’s video Google might have just killed websites.

Total hits during this period: 33,973

Most popular pages:

  1. Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles - 10,061 hits
  2. Web Browsers on PDAs - 2,496 hits
  3. The Death of Character in Game Console Interfaces - 2,393 hits
  4. China’s Parallel Web Behind the Wall - 2,252 hits
  5. Landing - 1,851 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Unknown - 12,264 hits
  2. Hacker News - 8,243 hits
  3. Google - 1,873 hits
  4. Bluesky - 1,494 hits
  5. GitHub - 706 hits

Quarter 3

For the quarter running from 01/07/2026 through 30/09/2026.

Total hits during this period: 53,928

Most popular pages:

  1. Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts - 12,369 hits
  2. CSS-Tricks in Limbo - 10,084 hits
  3. CSS Curiosities of the Past - 5,451 hits
  4. My HTML Boilerplate - 5,341 hits
  5. Landing - 2,638 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Unknown - 18,943 hits
  2. Hacker News - 15,102 hits
  3. Bluesky - 1,861 hits
  4. Google - 1,455 hits
  5. Reddit - 1,055 hits

2025

I wrote more in 2025 than I have any year previously, and it is beyond my belief how much traffic my site received. My mind boggles in an attempt to visualise such a number of people in one place. As someone who very rarely subscribes to newsletters, I’m amazed by how much reach some popular newsletters have.

Total hits during this period: 88,144

Overall, the most popular pages were:

  1. AI is Stifling Tech Adoption - 29,371 hits
  2. Landing - 7,056 hits
  3. My Experience Biohacking - 6,884 hits
  4. Open-Source is Just That - 6,373 hits
  5. Everything Is Chrome - 3,574 hits
  6. You Can’t Opt-Out of Accessibility - 3,317 hits
  7. Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions - 2,859 hits
  8. Portfolio - 2,813 hits
  9. How I Configure Neovim - 2,548 hits
  10. Posts - 2,286 hits

Overall, the top referrers were:

  1. Hacker News - 27,623 hits
  2. Unknown - 25,985 hits
  3. TLDR - 4,315 hits
  4. Reddit - 4,077 hits
  5. Google - 1,560 hits

Quarter 1

For the quarter running from 01/01/2025 through 31/03/2025.

Total hits during this period: 50,094

Most popular pages:

  1. AI is Stifling Tech Adoption - 28,570 hits
  2. My Experience Biohacking - 6,656 hits
  3. Everything Is Chrome - 3,296 hits
  4. Landing - 2,835 hits
  5. Strong Opinions on URL Design - 1,067 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Hacker News - 21,376 hits
  2. Unknown - 13,761 hits
  3. TLDR - 2,934 hits
  4. Reddit - 2,281 hits
  5. Hacker Newsletter - 825 hits

Quarter 2

For the quarter running from 01/04/2025 through 30/06/2025.

Total hits during this period: 15,777

Most popular pages:

  1. Open-Source is Just That - 6,283 hits
  2. Creativity Came to Pass - 1,871 hits
  3. Landing - 1,556 hits
  4. Posts - 560 hits
  5. Portfolio - 531 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Unknown - 4,931 hits
  2. Hacker News - 3,667 hits
  3. TLDR - 1,297 hits
  4. Reddit - 897 hits
  5. Bluesky - 295 hits

Quarter 3

For the quarter running from 01/07/2025 through 30/09/2025.

Total hits during this period: 8,523

Most popular pages:

  1. How I Configure Neovim - 1,884 hits
  2. Landing - 1,284 hits
  3. Wishes Upon My Demise - 966 hits
  4. Posts - 338 hits
  5. Portfolio - 286 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Unknown - 2,579 hits
  2. Reddit - 990 hits
  3. Hacker News - 665 hits
  4. Google - 461 hits
  5. Bluesky - 258 hits

Quarter 4

For the quarter running from 01/10/2025 through 31/12/2025.

Total hits during this period: 13,750

Most popular pages:

  1. You Can’t Opt-Out of Accessibility - 3,317 hits
  2. Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions - 2,859 hits
  3. Landing - 1,381 hits
  4. Portfolio - 960 hits
  5. How I Configure Neovim - 664 hits

Top referrers:

  1. Unknown - 4,714 hits
  2. Hacker News - 1,915 hits
  3. Google - 900 hits
  4. Accessibility Weekly - 632 hits
  5. GitHub - 581 hits

2024

2024 stats are fairly rough due to a failed merging of page statistics done in an attempt to address a change in URL structure – particularly the data early in the year. JPEG XL and Google’s War Against It was the first time I saw any notable traffic, and it almost exclusively came from Hacker News. From memory, there was a spike of ~1.7K readers over a 24-hour period. Based on subsequent Hacker News hits of mine, this seems low, but it wasn’t widely shared outside of Hacker News and was somewhat controversial, which would have stifled its publicity.

In late 2024, I wrote my first piece for HTMHell, sending a small spike of users to my site. Around the same time, Web Origami also did the rounds on Hacker News, sending a fair few users this way through a link I posted to this site’s homepage, a link to my post on The Implementation of This Site in the comments, and my inclusion on the project’s examples page.

Pre-2024

Prior to 2024 this site didn’t collect any visitor information, and due to being hosted on GitHub Pages, there are no server logs accessible to me for me to surmise from.

Footnotes

  1. While this could be negative in the sense of chasing figures, I don’t particularly care if a post ‘flops’ but do really enjoy when they succeed. View counts bolster my motivation but never hinder it. ↩

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