I started out by using my log of 483,000 page fetches spanning April 15 to July 26, but the effect of client software vs page fetched was very weak. I then decided to exclude July 22 and July 23 from my log, as that was when I got so much Slashdot traffic. Because the Slashdot caused traffic caused for such a large fraction of my overall hits, and many people read the whole site, stats for all pages were Slashdot biased. After removing July 22 and July 23 from my log, I was left with around 272000 page fetches.
For comparison, I also took logs for all page fetches from www.sentex.net
| Page Subset: | Typical Sentex | My total | Organ | Tech | Wood related | Jhead |
| Total hits | 45204 | 226508 | 7495 | 108067 | 34428 | 46086 |
| Browser Technology: | ||||||
| Gecko based browser | 4.5% | 8.8% | 9.6% | 8.7% | 7.4% | 23.2% |
| Internet Explorer | 89.3% | 74.1% | 77.8% | 66.8% | 84.6% | 63.9% |
| Client OS: | ||||||
| Linux | 0.6% | 2.3% | 2.5% | 2.5% | 1.9% | 14.1% |
| Mac | 4.4% | 3.9% | 5.0% | 2.6% | 3.5% | 5.3% |
| Windows XP | 34.3% | 34.3% | 29.7% | 35.3% | 32.1% | 36.3% |
| Windows 2000 | 18.3% | 21.7% | 21.9% | 19.5% | 26.3% | 23.4% |
| Windows NT 4.0 | 2.7% | 1.9% | 2.5% | 1.6% | 2.7% | 1.1% |
| Windows 9x | 32.2% | 18.7% | 25.4% | 13.2% | 24.1% | 8.2% |
There is some variation in client software used on my page, especially when comparing the Jhead page with the rest of my website. Jhead is a tool used to manipulate digital camera meta-data, so it has a much more technical audience than the rest of the content of my site. I excluded Jhead fetches from the "My total" column.
There is quite a difference in terms of use of Linux between my site and websites hosted on Sentex in general. Probably because my site does attract more technical people.
The 'Organ' and 'Wood related' categories score relatively high on Mac users. This I expected. The 'Artistic' folks always tend to lead towards Macs - its the artistically cool computer.
The 'Tech' category had the highest rate of Windows XP users, and lowest rate of Windows 98 users. Also to be expected - if you browse tech stuff on my website, you probably have up to date tech in your home.
And of course, to be expected, people who viewed the Jhead page were more likely than others to use a Gecko based browser, and Linux. Interesting that that column also has the highest rate of Mac users. I image OS-X has something to do with it. It attracts some fairly technically savvy users to the Mac platform. I did get e-mails from OS-X users about jhead on occasion. Most people who mail me about Jhead use Linux though.
Overall, these stats weren't as interesting as the Stats as a function of referring URL. Probably because people browse across my site quite a lot, so the data is not as independent. Whereas looking at referring URLs makes for much more independent data sets. Still, even within a a website, the penetration of Mac, Linux, and Gecko based browsers varies significantly.
Go back to my Analyzing traffic logs page.