Analyzing my web traffic

Analyzing my web traffic

One of the interesting things to look at is the Apache web logs for my website. While people are looking at my site, I'm looking back at them, looking at statistic trends to get an idea of who is looking at my website.

In recent months, my website has been slashdotted, as well as listed on a few similar Slashdot like sites and blogs. This drove traffic on my site way up, and gave me a big enough sample set to not just look at agregate statistics, but to actually break the traffic into groups and compare them. I concentrated my study on a log of 483,000 page fetches from April 15, 2003 to July 26, 2003.

One of the things that always has me curious is usage of alternative software - anything other than the stock Windows and Explorer. How many people are using Mozilla? How many use Linux? Turns out, there is no 'one' answer. Each measure is biased by how its taken, and even different pages on my website have differing ratios of client software usage.

Of course, I have to admit my own biases. I happen to hold the view that people who use anything other than Windows and Explorers are generally more technically knowledgeable, savvy, and just overall more virtuous in every conceivable way :-). Hence, I see the adoption of Mozilla, Linux, even Mac as a good thing.

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