Housekeeping

Start a blog using WordPress; it’ll be easy. You’ll spend most of your time writing and everything else is taken care of for you. That is pretty much what they say and it’s intriguing and I’ve always enjoyed writing, even as a kid, so here I am, trying to make a go of this.  However, I’m finding out this is not as easy as it is made out to be. And I’m this close to pulling the plug.

I don’t often post new content, but when I do open up my website, I like to find it the same way as I left it. About two months ago, I pulled up my website to view as a visitor would and the pages didn’t display appropriately. I don’t know if anyone else saw it that way, but I was embarrassed about it. So I logged in and worked to set it all back up, the way it should be. And that took a minute. I’m being generous, it took longer than a minute.

This last month I spent working with the, W3 Total Cache, optimizer plugin and I could tell by my site health feedback, that something was wonky with it. It couldn’t connect to my hosting site I guess, I don’t know.  Some one had left a comment on how easy my site was to load and I thought cool, I want it to keep doing that.

W3 Total has always worked for me in the past, and I’m not sure why site health would leave me indicator messages that it wasn’t working and since I couldn’t figure it out on my own, I deleted W3 and installed WP-Optimize. Site health was happy with the changes, which has made me happy that task is complete. Now here’s hoping my pages load quickly and easily for visitors. Please leave me feedback if they don’t. Thank you in advance.

Speaking of visitors.  I just want to know if someone has viewed my content and what pages they seemed most interested in. This should help me to know what types of content to write about. As well as, if I should continue with this adventure keeping my writing projects public, or just go private with it. Question: How popular is this website?

This last year I tried Monster Insights plugin. It works with Google Analytics. Well it does, when I it works. The data stream kept loosing connection. Now, I have about as patience  as the next person, but that was just too much and needed more over-site and tweaking than I was willing to give it.

I have uninstalled Monster and I have chosen Matomo Analytics. If you’ve visited the Site Privacy Page, you’ll see the opt-out option at the top. Which means I may not get my question answered through Matomo. However, it doesn’t need constant maintenance to work. What I will know if the visitor allows, is how many showed up to view my website. What pages they were interested in reading and what country the visitor was in when they read my content. The visitors interests are addressed and I don’t have to do anything else. I like that.

However, I still needed my question answered. I searched all through WordPress.org plugins for a simple visit counter.  I found, “Page Visit Counter-Lite“. It will not  collect a visitor’s personal data, which makes it GDPR compliant. It only comes with a bit of code, that is copy/pasted into an, html widget, which is displayed in the column on the right-hand side of my blog pages. If the page gets a visit, it will record the visit in numeric value. Not only will I know if my efforts have been worth it, so will everyone else.

I’m going to test drive it for about six months and if it works the way I need it to, which means it answers my question, then Matomo will be deleted and blogging content will be made simpler with fewer housekeeping tasks. And I like that, even more.

Now back to researching, computer science technology, in the 60s just to see how far we have come in the last 65 years. Blog post coming soon.

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