What I Learned Today

StatPress is a WordPress plugin that tracks site visitors and which pages they visit. Over the past couple of months, I’ve learned that this site gets 1000+ visitors each month (not necessarily unique) plus about 5000 visits from spiders (!). On April 22, there were 474 visitors in a single day. Slow world news day, perhaps?

Who are these visitors, and what do they come to see?

In aggregate, visitors to this site use:

• Operating system: Windows XP dominates the list, at about 50% of visits. It is followed by Mac OS X (17%), Windows Vista (15%), and Debian (9%). I’ve also had 3 visits from a BlackBerry, 1 from WebTV, and 1 from something called Symbian.
• Browser: Firefox 3 handily tops the list (36%), followed by IE 6 (20%) and IE 7 (19%). Next is Iceweasel (9%), which is a rebranded version of Firefox.

It’s fascinating to browse the search terms people typed that led them to my blog. The ten most recent were:

• what did i learn in psychology class
• touch sensitive dimmer stuck on
• what i learned today blog
• touch lamp won’t turn off
• Basketweave knit pattern
• what I learned today
• Reverse Corte
• problems with touch lamps
• indent négatif latex
• how much baking powder to add?

And overall, the most visited pages are:

• Why my touch-lamp won’t turn off
• How to make LaTeX use a hanging indent
• The entire category of Psychology posts (hey, my sister is the psychologist, not me!)

Any other favorites?

In addition to people-visits, this site also sees a lot of spiders. Interestingly, although referrals from google dominate all other search engines, I see many more spider visits from yahoo. Could it be that google has a more efficient spidering strategy, requiring fewer visits? Or yahoo is more fond of my site? We may never know. I also learned about search engines I’d never heard of, including Moreover, Naver (South Korea), Searchme (a “visual search engine” that just went offline today due to lack of venture capital), and Radian6.