Something I've been wanting to do is make gregstoll.com tracking-free. It didn't have a lot of tracking stuff, but I like knowing how much traffic my website gets, which pages are popular, etc. So I had two sources of tracking stuff:

  • Microsoft Clarity - this is something I added only a year ago to see recordings of how people use pages on my website. It's pretty neat, but I didn't use it much and it's not necessary, so I just removed it.
  • Google Analytics - this gave me data on traffic and popular pages and stuff. I considered a number of replacements - Fathom, Matomo, Simple Analytics, and Cloudflare Web Analytics, but I ended up going with Plausible. It has the right mix of functionality, price, and they take privacy seriously. They even integrate with Google Search Console you you can see what search terms bring people to your website!

Now that I've replaced both of those, Blacklight shows no tracking on my site! (previously it showed 1 ad tracker, which was below average, and 8 third-party cookies, which was above average!) So I'm pretty happy with the results.

For the record, right now my site gets around 700 unique visitors a day, and the most popular pages are:

  • Floating Point to Hex Calculator - this gets about 70% of my site's traffic(!), presumably because it ranks high on Google/Bing. Indeed, my top search terms for the whole site are "hex to float", "float to hex", "hex to float converter", "float to hex converter", "hex to double", "double to hex"...anyway, you get the idea 🙂
  • Baseball Win Expectancy Finder - this gets about 15% of the traffic, and the specific Expected Runs in an Inning is another 5% or so.
  • gregstoll.com homepage - around 3% of traffic
  • Clue Solver - around 2% of traffic
  • MLB Division Race Charts - around 0.5% of traffic, although I'll admit a large percentage of these are probably me, because the charts are fun to look at when the Astros are doing well 🙂

Anyway, it's pretty cool to see my projects are helping hundreds of people a day around the world, even if it's in a small way!