Usage Stats, Minor Upgrade, and Donations

Upgrades and Usage Stats

The cover image is our usage stats for the calendar year. We did the major software upgrade in July. At the same time we shifted focus to research, advocacy, and capability. We added a new logo and did a redesign of the site layout. Regular posting of news and events related to the public research sector started at that time. These things led to an increase in unique visitors. My estimate is that ~400 is the baseline of bots (search engine scrapers and the like). Taking that into account, we had ~500 unique visitors in July and September and ~600 in August. The bandwidth usage also went up substantially after the upgrade reflecting an increase in traffic. Today, we did a minor upgrade from 13.0.0 to 13.1.0-B2 that solves some issues that have been niggling.

Site Improvement, Maintenance, and Financial Support Request

The site has been free for anyone to use since the beginning in 2021 (no advertisements or selling your data either). This has been possible due to a few donations, all volunteer labour, and the kind developers at UNA.io providing pro-tier access to the software for free. We want to ensure that there is the financial certainty in place to keep it going into the future and improve the service. We believe the most stable way to do that is for members / visitors like you to give a relatively small monthly recurring donation.

We have added a Donation Page with recurring and one time donation options. Your donation will help cover expenses such as the iFramely (embedding tool) fee, domain name registration, and server costs. If we can get enough regular donations, we will be able to pay for customising the app (iOS and Android) for this site.

We are well aware that times are tough for those in our public research sector. Your donation of any amount is a huge help. If a one off donation suits your situation better, please do that.

Thank you for using Te Ara Paerangi Community Hub and for your help to keep it growing.