You can grab the extension for free on the Raycast Store.

Why this extension?

I heard of Fathom as a lightweight, privacy-first analytics solution with the fifth version of Brian Lovin’s website in late 2021.

I kept it in mind until November 2023, when I brought some improvements to my website. The setup was quite fast, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t end up lost in the analytics tool after five minutes of browsing. Refreshing.

After seeing Pedro Duarte’s video on creating a Raycast menu bar extension to display the number of YouTube subscribers, I had this idea of displaying the count of current visitors on my website — a small but fun project during the last days of 2023.

Fathom has a public API and brought some improvements a few months ago, so it was the perfect opportunity to bring live data and aggregations from Fathom to Raycast lovers. I added more commands to support the different categories of data Fathom provides, with a timeframe selection.

Building the extension

I had some prior experience with Raycast extensions, but it was my first time building a menu bar extension. Pedro covered almost everything in his video, and I found the rest of the needed info in Raycast API docs.

After getting the live count of visitors, I’ve found interesting to have the repartition between the different pages, then added referrers.

Then, I browsed Fathom API to get access to data aggregations. Everything was provided, so creating the corresponding commands for pageviews, referrers, browsers, devices, and countries was relatively straightforward.

Pedro had this idea (and brought me some help in building the concept) of a dedicated command to display the live count of subscribers inside Raycast — by updating the command’s subtitle, for tidy menu bar aficionados. He has been very enthusiastic and helpful throughout the whole extension build, so thanks a lot, Pedro!

I’m also thankful for the help that Per provided during the review process. And thanks to the entire Raycast team for offering this exciting playground that are extensions. Lastly, a big thanks to Ash Williams from the customer success team of Fathom, who provided assistance in understanding the API details.

For the curious ones, the code is available in Raycast’s extensions public repository on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

What’s next?

I have some plans to bring it a bit further with the support of events and other advanced features. But for now, I’ll let the community play with the extension, see what they love and find useful and what may need to be fixed/improved.