On Friday afternoon I logged off from a day of writing code at work to *checks notes* write more code. I started off at 5pm with a small goal of adding analytics to my latest project, Threadbare. By 1am, I realized I had spent my entire Friday night on random website maintenance tasks!
Google Analytics
Up until now I'd been using Umami, an open-source library, for website analytics. This lets me track page views, events, referrals, and limited user info like country and device platform for several of my web projects. Umami is self-hosted, so I was hosting a server and database connection via Heroku. This was working well until I received a notification that I was approaching the maximum storage capacity for my storage plan, so I started considering alternatives. My Google Chrome extension, Sign Search, automatically uses Google Analytics, so I decided to give it a try.
Now I'm tracking data for this website, Threadbare, and Our Power Hour with Google Analytics. It might be overkill for my purposes. I just want to see how many views I'm getting, which pages users view, and how people are stumbling across my websites. I'll try this out for a few weeks, and if it's too much then I'll switch back to Umami and purge data after a few months to manage my database storage.
Google Analytics page view data for this website. 99% of those views are from me testing my DNS settings, I'm not that popular
Netlify Custom Domain
I bought a custom domain for this website almost a year ago- lucia-gomez.dev. I'm hosting on Netlify, so this site is always accessible via www.lucia-gomez.netlify.app, but that isn't a very pithy name. Up until now I've had a hard time figuring out how to make Netlify use my custom domain. Instead, I set up forwarding so anyone who visited the .dev address would get sent to the .netlify.app address. But on this fateful night of website maintenance, I was on such a roll that I decided to tackle my domain name problem once and for all.
Two hours later I was only slightly regretting that decision. Netlify's UI really, really wants you to use Netlify DNS. I really, really didn't want to do that because I rely on Google's DNS for their email forwarding features for my mailing list. After a while I found this guide that explains how to do exactly what I wanted. Now if you look at the URL for this page you should see the .dev address! And now I know what a CNAME is: a domain name that is an alias for another domain name.
Later I might see if I can get my GitHub Pages projects under my custom domain as well. I have some simpler projects like Threadbare, Friendly Takeover, and Bubble Blower hosted with GitHub Pages because it's so convenient to create a webpage based on a project repo. It would be cool if I could have all of those under my .dev domain.
The DNS settings for my custom domain, setting up configs for Netlify and Mailjet
Sign Search Bug
The last stop on my website maintenance spree was fixing a bug with Sign Search. This is my one project that actually has real users, so I check on it fairly often to make sure it's working as expected. The search algorithm works by querying multiple American Sign Language dictionaries and compiling their results, so my code needs to stay up to date with all of those dictionaries' setups. This time something changed with Smart Sign Dictionary. I think they appended the word "ASL" to a lot of their video titles; a video called "Dog" became "Dog ASL". This messed up my algorithm for determining if a video matches a search query, so I published a quick fix for that.
I already knew the majority of my users are ASL students, but this graph really confirms that!
School's out for the summer = sad Sign Search graph