Monthly Archives: August 2010

More Boring Blog Statistics

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As a follow-up from my last post here are some more visitor statistics courtesy of Google Analytics. These are for sandfly.net.nz as a whole, not just this blog.

A world map showing the cities this site was visited from.
Last year I got nearly 18000 visits from over 4000 cities (not all appear on this map) in 128 countries. The top 5 cities are Auckland (with over 2000 visits), then London, Wellington, New York and Bangalore(!) It seems like the cities with a strong C++ development culture are better represented, but that is somewhat of a guess.

Two pie charts showing the OS and Browsers used to access this site.
These graphs show what browsers and operating systems people are using. Windows is still the most used OS at 58% but MacOSX is doing alright with 29% (Linux does 10%). This probably reflects the techie slant in the subjects I write about.

44% of my visitors use Firefox (which is what I use most of the time), but it is a three horse race for runner up between Safari (19%), IE (18%), and Chrome (13%). Chrome seems to be picking up in recent months so this graph might look quite different next year. A lot of people profess hatred for Safari, but it seems to be holding its market share (only on MacOSX though, hardly anyone uses the Windows version.) The really good news is only 2.6% of visits last year came from IE6 – the sooner that browser dies the better.

I wonder the same graphs would look like for other comparable sites.

200th Post – State of the Blog

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Yes, the title is correct – this is the 200th post on Life of Andrew. I started this blog almost exactly 4 years ago as a way of practising my writing. At the time I thought that 1 post a week was a good target, I guess I have fallen slightly short of that but not by much. I don’t know if my writing has improved, but it has been fun.

I case you were curious, here is a quick look behind the scenes:

This is a graph (from Google Analytics) of the weekly page views of Life of Andrew (this doesn’t count the rest of sandfly.net.nz.) I usually see between 30 and 60 page views a day, sometimes more if a particular entry gets linked somewhere. This hardly ever happens but I will admit to self-spamming certain sites occasionally to see what traffic turns up. I added the social media buttons to each post to see if that would encourage readers to post links to various sites but so far that hasn’t happened even once. I don’t know why the basic trend seems to be down, perhaps I haven’t written anything interesting lately.

By far the most popular post on the site is The HTML5 Video Tag’s Fatal Flaw – a rant about the then-new web standard which received some attention from Important People In The Industry. I wrote it while starving myself in preparation for oral surgery after two weeks of painful tooth ache – by far the best preparation for any type of rant, perhaps I should try it more often. It still gets a lot of hits, mainly from people searching for “HTML5 Video”. I hope it doesn’t put anyone off.

According to FeedBurner 44 people subscribe to Life of Andrew. I am not really sure I believe that number – I suspect it double counts people that read RSS feeds on more than one computer. But hello to however many there are of you out there.