I shipped my new blogfolio! Here’s a glance at what’s new, and some analytics too!

Hi everyone!

This issue is arriving in your inboxes later in the month because as the year comes to a close, I’ve got more things to wrap up at work, and I’ve been working on something in my “downtime.”

As teased in the last issue, I’ve been slowly revamping my portfolio and I’m excited to announce that I released it to the world this week!

There’s a lot that’s new in this rebuild, including:

✅ Notion as a CMS

✅ Article reactions

✅ Automated Open Graph images

✅ Stats page

✅ Intelligent article suggestions

✅ ‘READ’ feature on articles seen

There are a few technical reasons, but a big part of my decision to rebuild stemmed from my continuous desire to learn new things. I treat my domain as an environment for experimentation; an area to promote creativity.

My codebase is ever-evolving and changing. Sometimes things stick around, while other times I realize it’s best not to push something to the public. Regardless of the end result, I always learn something.

I do have a few reasons that are a bit more justifiable:

I had the opportunity to work with a stack I’ve grown very fond of, and learn new tools and skills at the same time! Here’s a list of the tech stack I used for my blogfolio:

I use Plausible as my analytics solution - it’s unobtrusive and doesn’t track personal information about visitors on my website.

I expected a small surge of traffic on the day I released my new site - perhaps double the amount of normal daily visitors, and a decreased bounce rate.

The results actually shocked me. Here’s a snapshot of the analytics on the day I released my blogfolio:

Let me break it down really quick:

And that’s not all - the unique visitor count has increased since launch, and page views remain around 1,700 - 2,000. It’s very exciting, and I can’t wait to see what my analytics look like at the end of the month!

I released a pretty detailed article about my blogfolio rebuild. If you want to get some in-depth insights, feel free to check this out!

I’ve got some pretty exciting news to share in my next issue coming in January - keep an eye out!

That’s all for this month’s newsletter!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Braydon