chrishowie.com

I’ve switched this blog to new hosting. Hopefully the only difference you’ll notice is faster load times.

About two weeks ago I started collecting statistics for this website, something I’ve always planned on doing but never actually cared enough to sit down and do. Two weeks doesn’t make for a great sample period but the results are still interesting.

Almost 25% of visitors use some version of IE and 44% use Firefox. (20% did not identify their browser.) This is rather astounding to me. Apparently either FF gained more market share than I thought or this blog tends to attract the kind of people who use FF (probably the latter). Mozilla, Opera, and Safari are straggling at 5.7%, 3.3%, and 1.4% respectively.

Out of the 25% using IE, the usage is almost exactly split between IE6 and IE7, with IE7 almost a full 1% ahead. Can someone please explain why people are still using IE6? Seriously people, this is 2008.

Firefox >= 3.0 accounts for a little over half of all FF traffic with various versions of 2.0 making up for most of the difference and a negligible amount of 1.0 and pre-1.0 hits making up the rest.

When it comes to operating systems, almost 54% are using Windows, 21% Linux, 3% Mac OS X, and 22% unidentified. Windows XP wins with 40% overall usage and Vista can claim 7%. Most of the Linux hits didn’t identify the distro.

The search robot report is interesting. From the major search engines, Google was the most conservative, making 236 hits for 2.83MB of data. MSN hit 975 times for 9.71MB. The winner is Yahoo: 2057 hits for a whopping 27MB. I’m not quite sure why Yahoo needs so much… Google seems to keep up just fine while consuming only a tenth of what Yahoo does.

Not surprisingly, the most popular blog posts are not about my own projects. The most viewed one by far was a gripe about gnome-terminal. Seems many people have the same irritation that I do.

So yeah. I don’t really have any point to make, except possibly that people should not be using IE6 anymore, and some search engines should really optimize their crawlers better.

Etch has finally been released. I have upgraded layla (the server running this blog) from Sarge to Etch, and the upgrade process was pretty smooth. Only a few things needed manual attention.

Quite surprisingly, there weren’t any problems upgrading the kernel to 2.6.18, even though this required replacing hotplug with udev, something I’ve experienced pain with before. One reboot is all it needed.

Now that the blog is running, expect posts regularly!

Well, by regularly I mean every so often. And maybe you shouldn’t expect them or you might be disappointed.