Learning | 2i2c

TIL: A few ways to track web traffic for open source projects

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding how people discover and navigate your project’s web presence is valuable for open source communities, but there are a lot of options out there and many maintainers may not know about them. Recently Chris did some research to improve the web analytics for Jupyter, and learned about several options for tracking web traffic¹. Here’s a quick report of what stood out.

Three analytics tools we found helpful #

Plausible.io - A privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant analytics service

Clean interface with public dashboards (see Jupyter’s dashboard)
Paid service but offers 15% discount for open source projects
Cost scales with traffic volume. It can get expensive for a project as big as Jupyter!
This is the service we ultimately ended up using…

ReadTheDocs Analytics - Built-in traffic tracking for documentation sites

Available as a free add-on for ReadTheDocs projects, it provides traffic data specific to documentation pages.
There’s no additional cost if already using ReadTheDocs, though if you’re on a business plan you may need to pay for it.
The analytics are a bit barebones, but quite useful for learning where your readers are navigating.
Enable in Settings > Addons > Analytics.

GitHub Repository Analytics - Native analytics in GitHub.

Shows clones, views, and referring sites. This is also fairly barebones, but it’s really useful to see who is actually looking at your repository.
Free for all GitHub repositories.
Access via Insights > Traffic on any repository.

Learn more #

GitHub issue coordinating Jupyter’s analytics work
Plausible.io public dashboard for jupyter.org (this might be down for now, but we’re working to bring it back up)
ReadTheDocs Analytics documentation
GitHub Traffic Analytics API

Acknowledgements #

Thanks in particular to Jason Grout from the Jupyter Executive Council for collaborating on this investigation and helping test these tools.

Chris has been serving on the Jupyter Executive Council as a Foundational contribution. This was related to that effort! ↩︎

[Person's name] on [Topic]

Wed, 01 Jan 1000 00:00:00 +0000

One or two sentences describing a piece of content that you’d like to reference, its main takeaway, its author, and why it’s worth reading (add a link to it and the author’s name).

Some things that stood out to us:

Quotes, images, etc from the post that you’d like to highlight. Just one or two is fine, but add as much as you like. Make sure you’re using exact quotes!

They mention ____ about ____

Pull quote

They also talk about ____

Pull quote

Read more in the original article: article title.

Acknowledgements #

Bulleted list of people and organizations to thank, with links to their spaces.

TIL: How to do XYZ thing for Y outcome

Wed, 01 Jan 1000 00:00:00 +0000

One or two sentences setting context about a common problem.

One to many sections describing something we’ve tried and what we’ve learned in solving that problem.

Embed any images, videos, or youtube videos that are relevant. Put images in a file in the same folder called featured.png so it shows up as a feature preview.

Learn more #

Bulleted list of URLs where readers can learn more or follow along.

Acknowledgements #

Bulleted list of people and organizations to thank, with links to their spaces.

EXTRA EXAMPLES #

Here’s a blog post with an example of what we’re looking for: contentblog/2025/github-action-secrets-forked-repositories/index.mdindex.md