Steve Krouse

@stevekrouse.com

2759 Followers 210 Following

How I Track My Blog’s Analytics with Val Town ValtownHTTPAnalyticsBlogJekyll Apr 15, 2025 Random morning thoughts: how many people actually visit this blog? Where do they come from? What if I could just spend a little time to build my own analytics? I used Plausible Analytics for a while, it's a great Firebase alternative and worth checking out. It has a smooth interface and is easy to set up. However, I realized I don’t need all the features it offers, and the traffic I get is (probably — last time I checked) not huge. So my needs for analytics are really simple: I want to know: How many people visit my blog (in the last week, month, year) Where they come from (which social media, search engine, etc.) Which posts are the most visited It shouldn't be that hard, right? Server Setup I decided to use Val Town’s free tier to set up an HTTP server backed by a simple SQLite database. Val Town is a website where you can write serverless JavaScript functions, with an emphasis on collaboration. The server basically has two endpoints: A POST endpoint that registers events by writing to a SQLite database. A GET endpoint that returns all the events found in the database. It also serves a JS script. This script gets injected into the <head> of every page of my blog (you just got injected too) and sends events to the POST endpoint. The script is obfuscated to make it harder to extract the API key. The main reason why I serve the js key from the server is that it makes it easier to rotate/refresh keys.
stevekrouse/status, a val town project with a status page, a readme, and other files
Val Town Newsletter 22 Steve Krouse Steve Krouse on Dec 2, 2024 Val Town is growing up! We’re working on features and infra that will fundamentally unlock the scope and scale of what you can build in Val Town. We have two major efforts running in parallel: projects and scalability. Projects are containers for multiple vals, folders, and files. The enable you to create infinitely complex real-world apps, instead of being limited to a single long val. Internal to a project, vals will use relative imports (ie ./foo/bar), so they can be forked as a unit, and merged back in as a unit. Projects will also improve Townie’s ability to help write your vals in more modular files, so that it doesn’t have to regenerate all the code on every change. Scalability will enable you to run production workloads in Val Town, with usage-based pricing, custom alerts, and caps. We hope to have both of these efforts live in the coming months. In the meantime, we’ve shipped many other features and improvements, including a dozen Townie upgrades, scoped API permissions, a partnership with Fal, and more. Justin Bennett has joined our team! He is well-known for the DevtoolsFM podcast, and was most recently at The Recurse Center, Membrane, and Oxide. We’ve known Justin for years, and are thrilled he’s on the team. As per usual, the highlight of our newsletter is at the bottom: a list of the most interesting community vals we’ve seen this month, including a bunch working with the Bluesky API, a Val Town clone built on Val Town, Stripe examples, virtual money, data journalism, lightning-fast Cerebras 2k-tokens-per-second demos, and dozens more! 🤖 Townie upgrades Townie has been massively upgraded this month. We shipped some of the most common feature request and fixed the worst bugs.
Fruits of a cron val! I use a val to trigger the download of the recent video from the SOHO observatory near the sun, then upload it somewhere web-accessible & send it to me in a little personal Discord channel. These videos are awesome but tend to be same-y… except for recent days, which have been WILD, with Mercury skulking across the left side of the frame, that new comet soaring across, and the recent solar storm blasting out like a confetti cannon:
Proxied Web Browser – DNS Debugger It's difficult to check new DNS records, because old records may be cached on your computer, browser, or local network. This tool uses a proxied fetch so you can always view your web page uncached.
Lantian Graber was born in 1991 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of an acupuncturist mother of Chinese descent and a math teacher father of Swiss descent.[1][2] Her mother grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and emigrated in the 1980s, and named her "Lantian," meaning "blue sky" in Mandarin Chinese, as a wish for her to have "boundless freedom".[1]
Bluesky Firehose visualization, filter how many messages to display and the rate of new messages, and a word cloud