A new service from GitHub is designed to show you where the viewers of repositories are coming from and what content they’re looking at.

The GitHub Traffic Analytics service is designed for developers with projects on GitHub so you can see the original source of viewers of your project so you can work out how they heard about your project.

According to the announcement of the new service:

You can now see detailed analytics data for repositories that you're an owner of or that you can push to. Just load up the graphs page for your particular repository and you'll see a new link to the traffic page:

The detailed information on the Traffic tab includes a graphical display the number of views and visitors over a time period that lets you drill down to inspect each day's figure. The tables below the chart list the most popular referring sites and the most popular content viewed.

(Click to enlarge)

The announcement of the traffic analytics was made alongside the news that GitHub Pages has been improved. From now on, when someone visits a Pages site the page is served by a global Content Delivery Network rather than GitHub serving the content directly. This means that the nearest physical server can serve up a cached page at “blazingly fast speeds” according to Aziz Shamin's post on the GitHub blog The change means that as an added bonus GitHub can now protect your GitHub Pages site with the same kind of Denial of Service mitigation services used for GitHub.com.

Shamin points out that if you are using a subdomain, custom subdomain, or an A record with GitHub Pages, you may need to make some changes to ensure you don’t miss out.

If you are using a custom subdomain (like www.example.com), you should use a CNAME record pointed at username.github.io, and if you currently use an A record, you can tell if you need to move if your A record is pointed to 207.97.227.245 or 204.232.175.78.

If you switch to a subdomain or switch to a DNS provider that supports ALIAS records, you can take advantage of the Content Delivery Network and Denial of Service mitigation.