Yearly review: Looking back at 2024
7 min read
Like last year, I want to share some insights on how the year 2024 went for my websites. If you are interested in how the data collection works or you want to compare the numbers to last year, you can read last year’s review.
But without further ado, let’s look at the numbers:
My portfolio: pawcode.de
pawcode.de is my personal portfolio where I showcase my projects. Even though I did not get the urge to rewrite it again (yet), I am still working on it from time to time. My main focus was to keep all dependencies up to date and try to improve the performance of the website. The next upcoming update will upgrade the project to Angular 19, introducing incremental hydration. This results in even less JavaScript being sent to the client, since parts of the website do not get hydrated at all!
Visits, views and other general stats
The website had 520 visitors in the last year with a total of 717 page views. The average number of visits per month is hovering around 45 - 50. I am happy with these numbers, but I would like to see them grow again in the future. Here is a graph of these visits per month:
Unfortunately there was a bug in my tracking code between mit July and August, so the numbers are missing.
Another interesting thing to know is how many views each project has. This year my focus was on my open source projects, spending less time building websites for clients. This is also reflected in the views of my projects on my portfolio, grouped by their category. Switching percentages, Open Source (73.8%) is the most viewed category, followed by Websites (23.0%) and Legacy Android Apps (3.3%). Even my most recent project, astro-integration-pocketbase, which also marks my first npm package, already has some views.
Here are the top 5 projects (by their views):
I kept the colors grouped by category similar to how they are on my website.
One last statistic before we move on to the users: the uptime of my website (and other services). In an ideal world, programs would never crash and servers would never go down with a 100% uptime. But unfortunately, we live in the real world and things break or need to be updated. And so here is a graph of the uptime of my websites:
Last year my goal was to have an uptime of at least 99.95% (which is 21.92 minutes of downtime per month). As you can see, I mostly achieved this goal with nearly all the services.
Users and their preferences
Now that we looked at what people do on my website, let’s take a shallow look at who these people are and what they prefer. I am not tracking any personal data, just some general information (e.g. browser used, preferred language). In other words, just stuff that is already sent to the server with every request anyways. I also do not use this data for marketing or advertising. Instead I use it to get a better understanding of how people use my websites and what I could do to improve their experience.
To not go into too much detail with 100 different screen sizes, here is a graph of the different device types instead:
This year, even more people are using a desktop (or laptop) to visit my website. But again, the website is optimized for desktop viewing.
One surprising thing is again the preferred theme of my visitors. My portfolio still only has a light theme, but apparently this is in line with the preferences of my visitors. Even more people are using a light theme in their browser / on their device.
The last thing I want to talk about (for my portfolio) is the preferred language of my visitors. I am a native German speaker, living in Germany with mostly German customers, so I decided to also create my portfolio in German. Let’s see how that worked out this year:
The number of German visitors increased by almost 100% and is now at 31.2%. Still the majority of my visitors would prefer to read my website in English, so I definitely need to do something about that this year.
One thing that is already written in English is:
My blog: blog.pawcode.de
At the end of 2023, I started this blog to share some of my experiments and background information on my projects. Over the last year, I added a few more articles, trying out integrating local AI into Rainbow Palette or building my first npm package. Let’s see how these new posts performed:
Visits and views
Over the last year, I had 191 visitors with a total of 208 page views. The average number of visits per month was slightly short of 16, but overall I’m really happy with these numbers. Here is a graph of these visits per month:
Mimicking the format of my portfolio, I also tracked the views of each of my posts. This year I got more than only the one post of 2023, so the chart is a bit more interesting.
The colors are randomly assigned and do not have any meaning this time.
The first and oldest post is still the most viewed one. But I’m happy to see that the effort I put into the article about local AI in Rainbow Pallette, creating interactive examples and demos, paid off. This was my favorite post to write this year and I’m already looking forward to create more interactive posts like this one.
And to finish the general stats, here is the uptime of my blog:
Not much to say here, since I don’t host the blog myself.
Where it gets more interesting though is:
Users and their preferences
Starting with device type (again), you can see that the split was around 90/10 between desktop and mobile. Still surprising but a better ratio than last year.
One thing that I’d like to do is to include some kind of tracking pixel. This would allow me to also see how many people are using some kind of RSS reader without executing any JavaScript.
The last thing I want to talk about is the preferred language of my readers here. When I started building this blog, I decided to write all posts in English rather then German like on my portfolio. Since the content is more technical and English is the language of developers, I thought it would be better to write in English to reach a wider audience.
Again this was a good decision since 46.6% of my visitors prefer English, while the rest hopefully can read English as well.
What’s next?
I am still very happy with the results of the last two years and I will continue to collect data on my websites in the future. I’ll continue my plan to write this yearly review and I hope you enjoyed reading it.
For the near future, I want to enable incremental hydration on my portfolio with Angular 19. This can hopefully improve the performance of the website and make it a bit faster. Besides that, I’ll probably look into internationalization to als make my portfolio available in English.
This blog will also get some updates, waiting for its upgrade to Astro 5.0 and a few new (interactive) posts.
Hope you enjoyed these insights and have a great year 2025 🚀!
Want to see the insights of the year 2023? Read the review of 2023.