GoatBar menu bar app for GoatCounter

When I recently moved my blog to Jekyll, I also wanted to find a lightweight solution to analytics. I don’t need a lot around here - just seeing pageviews and referrers is generally enough, and given that, I don’t want to use a super heavy solution that downloads huge javascript files.

I settled on GoatCounter, which is a lightweight solution for my needs, and has been working well for me so far.

Since this site doesn’t get a ton of traffic, I’m unlikely to visit the analytics pages every day, and thus might miss someone who has linked here that I might want to respond to. So, I built GoatBar - a small menu bar app that displays total pageviews in the last 24 hours on the menu bar:

And if you click it, you’ll see an hourly breakdown for those last 24 hours:

It’s very small and lightweight - I’ve had it running for a week or so on my Mac, and it’s using around 23MB of RAM.

I’m making it available in source form only, so you’ll need to build it yourself in Xcode, but it just takes a minute!

Related, it’s quite striking how much progress tools like Codex and Claude Code have made in the last few months. Codex wrote the majority of the code in this app.