As you may know, I am a long user of an Ubuntu-flavored operating system (Kubuntu). So as I need a stable system, I usually stick with the Long Term Support (LTS) releases. Currently, my laptop runs Kubuntu 20.04.

At my new working place, people actively use calendar/email facilities. Hence, I have to start using an email client that supports this functionality. Our IT support recommends using Thunderbird, and I followed their advice. As usual in Linux distros, I have installed a Thunderbird version using my package manager and configured my email client according to the recommendations.

However, after I started to use it, I have faced issues in calendar functionality (e.g., its inability to synchronize event data) that were very difficult to triage. I checked some forums looking for explanations of some particular error codes and how to resolve them. There, I discovered that the calendar sub-system was improved considerably in Thunderbird 91.0. I checked my version of Thunderbird, and it was 78.13.x. After I found that, I decided to update Thunderbird. However, at that time, I did not manage to find a Personal Package Archive (PPA) or a deb file with this newer version. Therefore, I decided to wait until a new Ubuntu version (21.10) would be released because I thought it might bring Thunderbird 91. Unfortunately, this did not happen for older releases, and I decided to install Thunderbird 91 manually. In this article, I describe how I updated Thunderbird from version 78 to 91.

In the article, I show the differences in the website analytic metrics collected on the server- and client-side. It contains several dynamic values (e.g., pageviews or visits number, the date range, etc.) scattered throughout the text. To update them, I need to pass through the content and adjust them manually. So as I plan to bring the data in this post up to date regularly (I get new input every day), this task cumulatively could consume a lot of my time. Therefore, I have decided that the data in the post should be updated automatically. In this article, I describe how I have achieved this goal.

Some time ago, I wrote an article showing how much data is missed if you rely on only client-side web analytics numbers. To maintain this previous blog post in an actual state, I planned to update it from time to time. However, as you might expect, pretty soon, I got bored collecting manually Cloudflare and Google Analytics data and inserting it into a spreadsheet. As a normal human, I have decided to automate the process. Luckily, both systems provide the APIs that you can use to query and download the data. However, during the development of the data collection script, I discovered several limitations that inclined me to write a new blog post instead of updating the old one.