Blog statistics for 2025
Tomorrow is the last day of 2025, and there is a high probability that the next year will be 2026, just like Saturday comes after Friday, and Sunday comes afterwards.
2025 was also the first full year that I have been using Umami as my online analytics service to track people visiting my blog.
I know that “tracking people” sounds bad, but as I said many times, I just do it because I like looking at numbers and graphs, I am not selling that data to anyone, I don’t use it to “plan new content”, it does not leave my VPS, and in general it’s very anonymized. So I hope you will forgive me.
Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to looks at some of the statistics and think what they mean.
Most popular posts of 2025
The most popular post of 2025 is Set up GPSD with U-blox7 GPS Dongle on Linux, which is almost two years old by now, but it’s still an evergreen as people search for it a lot. I guess the problem with configuring a USB dongle GPS has not gone away since then. And when I was writing it I was sure nobody will read about such a niche issue.
The second most popular post is How to monitor 12V battery charge with a Raspberry Pi Pico. In 2026 I plan to revisit this project and work on integrating battery monitoring with Home Assistant.
And the third most popular post is How to set up subdomains in the homelab with PiHole and Caddy. I have not really touched my Caddy install since I wrote that post, but it still works.
Referrers
Google is the main source of visits to my blog, at 68% of visitors coming from their its results, with an additional 5% that came from that one time when my blog post was listed in the Discover widget on Android phones. That was a fun day, I got a week’s worth of traffic in a few hours.
Second is duckduckgo and third is Reddit. I don’t read Reddit much, but I post my blog posts to the theme of POSSE.
And there’s the topic of the Fediverse. Every time I publish a new blog post I publish a link to on both of my Fediverse accounts, and it’s there that I have basically all of the conversations about what I post (apart from few awesome emails which I received, please keep them coming!).
The Fediverse is not that visible in the traffic statistics, because, well, it’s decentralized. Meaning each instance has its own referrer, and sometimes even the client apps put their own ones instead. Furthermore, for a long time Mastodon did not provide any referrer at all, but that has changed in the recent versions. In overall, I am seeing a steady growth of visitors with Fediverse referrers, and that is awesome.
On the list there are also a few fellow blogs whose creators have been so kind to link to my stuff (thank you!), and also, which makes me much less happy, LLMs going through my blog posts.
Browsers, OSes and Devices
My audience is much more Firefox centric than the general populace, with 20% if visits coming from the Mozilla browser. Chrome trumps all, Apple products are third. Mozilla, please, please, please, get your stuff together and dump those pointless AI features that people do not want.
Operating Systems. Linux is at 14%. Who would have expected that people who read a blog that is in a very large part about Linux shenanigans, use that system themselves?
Devices. Mobile wins, and frankly, I am not sure how Umami makes the division between a laptop and a desktop.
Location
More than half of my visitors come from English speaking countries, then there’s Germany, and Poland is fourth. Netherlands and Singapore make suprisingly high numbers, taking in mind their size. I mean the size of the countries, I met some Dutch people at my previous work, and it felt weird being of mid height compared to them. And the Dutch have a very big presence in the Fediverse, as least that’s what I’m seeing.
FAQ
How well does Umami filter out bot traffic?
From what I’ve been comparing Umami statistics with nginx logs it does a rather good job, mostly because it requires JS to run, and crawlers most often don’t run JS scripts on the pages they visit. Which also means that any prefetching done by the Fediverse instances is not calculated towards the views. Of course, from time to time I see some weird spike of patterns that clearly suggest that those views are not of human nature.
I do not want to be tracked by your web analytics
Ok! Sorry for making it opt-out instead of opt-in. You can block the umami.stfn.pl domain in your adblocker. Also the Pro Plus DNS block list which I personally recommend to add to PiHole has my Umami blocked. I also wrote a few blogs on how to block ads and trackers using PiHole, for example Using PiHole and Tailscale to block ads on all my devices, including mobile.
Has Umami been causing you some problems lately?
Bottom Line
And that’s it, the final blog post of 2025. Including this one, I wrote 44 blog posts this year, and so far, the upcoming years looks very promising in many aspects. New blog posts are in the making!
Thanks for reading!