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Analytics, sitemap and RSS — going public

I added Umami analytics, sitemap, robots.txt and RSS feeds to the site. Privacy-first tracking, zero cookie banners. Building in public, episode two.

The site is live. Now I want to know if anyone is reading it — and make sure they can actually find it.

The problem

After shipping the first version I had a clean minimalist site, but zero visibility into traffic. No signals for search engines either — no robots.txt, no sitemap, no RSS.

Three things to fix:

  1. Analytics — who visited, from where, what they read
  2. Discoverability — so Google and others know what’s here
  3. RSS — for readers who subscribe to blogs

Analytics: why Umami?

Google Analytics is the de facto standard, but I didn’t want it here. Reasons:

  • Cookies — GA requires a cookie consent banner. For a blog with a handful of posts, that’s just noise.
  • Privacy — data goes to Google, not me.
  • Bloat — the GA script is heavy and slows down page loads.

Umami solves all three:

  • No cookies → no consent banner
  • GDPR-friendly by default
  • One lightweight <script> tag
  • Dashboard with pageviews, referrers, countries, devices

I went with Umami Cloud — free up to 100,000 pageviews a month, which is more than enough for a personal blog. Integration took literally one minute:

<script
  defer
  src="https://cloud.umami.is/script.js"
  data-website-id="..."
></script>

The script goes into <head> in BaseLayout.astro — defined once, applies to the entire site.

Sitemap: @astrojs/sitemap

Search engines need to know what pages exist. A sitemap tells them.

Astro has an official integration:

npm install @astrojs/sitemap
// astro.config.mjs
import sitemap from '@astrojs/sitemap';

export default defineConfig({
  site: 'https://rebjak.com',
  integrations: [sitemap()],
});

Every build now auto-generates sitemap-index.xml. All pages — both Slovak and English versions — are included. No manual maintenance.

robots.txt

A simple file at public/robots.txt — allows crawlers and points them to the sitemap:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://rebjak.com/sitemap-index.xml

RSS feed

A blog without RSS is half a blog. Anyone following more than a handful of sites uses a feed reader — and if you’re not in it, you’re easy to miss.

Via @astrojs/rss:

npm install @astrojs/rss

I created two endpoints — /rss.xml for the Slovak blog and /en/rss.xml for English. Each endpoint loads the right content collection, filters out drafts and returns valid RSS XML. A <link rel="alternate"> in <head> lets browsers and feed readers detect it automatically.

What does this give me?

  • Umami dashboard — from day one I know how many people visited, where they came from and what they read. No cookies, no consent banner.
  • Sitemap — Google and other search engines get a complete page list on every crawl.
  • robots.txt — I explicitly tell crawlers they’re welcome.
  • RSS — readers can subscribe in their favourite reader.

The whole thing took about an hour and the site is now a significant step closer to what it should be — publicly accessible, measurable and subscribable.

What’s next?

  • Real content in the portfolio
  • Articles about Linux, development and automation
  • Open Graph images for blog posts

Building in public — let’s build this together.

Source code on GitHub.