Physically Incorrect

So, it has been over a year and a half now since I’ve opened this blog.  I thought I’d take a break from posting my puzzles and rants and show you some of this site’s statistics.

I monitor the site’s traffic with the AWSTATS plugin, which is a free way of checking out how many visitors a site gets and where they come from. I think this data is fascinating. It really tells you (me) a lot about people - what they use, what they Google, where they come from. Sort of gives me an overview of my microcosmos of readers and visitors. This information has no real value, but I think it’s just fun to check out, from an anthropological point of view.

So, here’s an interesting graph showing the number of unique visitors (blue) and visits (purple) to this blog since the day it was born. Every dot represents a month, starting November 2007, ending May 2009 (this excludes robots, RSS feed requests and so forth):

You probably noticed there’s a gap where this year’s March should’ve been. Well, it’s not a gap really. Someone linked to this blog from stumbleupon, and I got a whopping 10000 unique visitors, in a day. Who? Why? What did they link to? I’ve got no idea. If you’ve got a clue, leave a comment. It’s a mystery to me.

It turns out the most frequented page on this blog (excluding the RSS feed, etc.) is this post about infinite resistor networks. Once again, why? I’ve got no idea. I’m guessing people really like infinite resistor networks :).

78% of all visitors this month spent only 0-30 seconds on this blog. So it’s the other 22% that really make up the readers.  I wonder how other sites are doing in terms of holding their visitors’ attention. I suppose it’s like a book in a  book store. Most people casually glance it over. Few pick it up and browse through it. Fewer still read beyond the first page. And even fewer buy it eventually.

80% of you use a Windows machine. 14% a Mac. Only 3% use Linux. The others are undetermined.

53% use Firefox, 27% use Internet Explorer. 12% use Safari. A “whopping” 1.6% use Opera. Only  0.5% use Netscape. Ah, I remember the days when Netscape held a 90% market share. I even remember the days there was NO market share :). I still have my old 300 Bauds modem stashed somewhere in the attic. Figuratively speaking, of course - I don’t have a real attic.

The most popular phrase that was Googled and led to this blog is “guide to writing a physics engine”. Probably because of this post. I feel bad for the searchers, though - I didn’t really say anything about writing an actual physics engine, it was just a random thought I had. However, the interesting thing is that actually most visits don’t come from Google at all, but rather from links and returning visitors. This month, I’ve had 1043 pages requested directly; only 242 were reached via an internet search engine, and only 73 were reached via external links. So much for the belief the Google is one’s main source of traffic! Speaking of which, I got one measly visitor from Yahoo. What’s up with that, Yahoo? I’ll be damned if I use your engine.

Now, I did get acknowledged by being quoted on Wikipedia! That’s right, I’m a reference on their Beats entry. They’ve linked to my post about tuning your guitar using beats. The funny thing is, you’d expect a link from Wikipedia would give you some serious traffic. Guess how many people got here this month through that link, though?

3.

Oh well, I’ll take comfort from my lofty position as an expert on beats. After all, Wikipedia says I’m one.