Journal: News & Comment

1000 days

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Today marks 1000 days since I installed my basic page tracker on this site on 7 January 2002. (The site itself has been up since 1997, and has been at penmachine.com since March 2000.) My actual web server statistics are more detailed, but also more complicated—the tracker gives a basic overview of traffic to my journal pages (as well as a few other key parts of the site). Here's what the summary looks like today.

Some highlights:

• I've had more than 87,000 unique visits to the site in 1000 days, or about 87 per day (though more recently I've been averaging over 200 a day, and I've already passed 87 as of 10:30 this morning). This weblog now gets about 1200 unique visits a week, or roughly 5500 a month. (My server stats tell me that the site overall gets closer to 14,000 visits a month, since many people read articles and look at pictures that aren't monitored by the weblog tracker.)
• My busiest day was this past May 11, when web design gurus Dave Shea and Jeffrey Zeldman both linked here on different topics and brought in more than 1300 people. That week saw more than 3400 visitors here, and over 8000 for the month.
• A lot of people must read my site while at work or school, because visits peak around lunchtime.
• Most people visiting here use either Apple's Safari browser or one of the Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape family (all of which the tracker counts as "Netscape 7"), not Internet Explorer for Windows (which comes in second)—so my audience is heavily skewed away from the norm on the Web. The split between Windows and Mac users is pretty even: 49% windows to 46% Mac, which is also way out of line to the general reality out there.
• More than 1.2% of my visitors use Linux—they've outnumbered users of Windows 95 and Windows ME in the past 1000 days, and even FreeBSD, WebTV, Sun, and Amiga users outnumber Windows 3.1 users in my visitor logs. As for you IRIX, HP-UX, and OS/2 die-hards: keep fighting the good fight.
• Interestingly, for the site overall (using my private detailed web stats), the results are a bit more normal: 61% for Internet Explorer, 16% for Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape, and 15% for Safari, with 67% running Windows, 26% on the Mac, and 1.5% Linux. I've had 96 people visit in the past year using the Symbian OS, which runs on mobile phones. Hello to you!
• Just under 61% of visitors come here directly, or from another site. Another 39% are from search engines (overwhelmingly Google, but also Yahoo! and MSN Search), with the tiny remainder from e-mail links, Usenet, and other sources.
• Those coming from search engines are looking for information about Vancouver fireworks, wireless PowerBooks, HP's mysterious "Printer Mispick" error message, Aeron chairs, Jerker desks from Ikea, the Aerolatte battery-powered milk foamer, Blogger templates, printing from older Windows machines through Mac OS X on a network, and even occasionally for someone who does writing and editing in Vancouver.

Maybe we'll come back and re-examine those numbers in another 1000 days, in the summer of 2007.

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