Tracking and Tracing

Recently, I've started keeping track of the traffic coming to the site. Not for any reason in particular, mostly just because Blogger have started offering the feature. It's been interesting to see. I've been most surprised by just how many hits my blog has gotten since they started monitoring it in early July, though I also noticed that close to a quarter of them were coming from a Chrome user in the Netherlands. Yours truly. So clearly while the figures seem high, they're really not.

By far the majority of my visitors come from Ireland. Discounting the massive share of visits from Chrome as being myself, statistically the visitor will be running either Internet Explorer or Firefox on Windows. Blogger isn't taking version information, so I can't check if anyone is checking in with IE6 on Windows XP.

It goes to show how small my readership is that by looking through the stats I can pick out specific people. Like the Macintosh user from Ireland who checks every couple of days, the Opera user from the UK and the person browsing through a Java client on their DoCoMo mobile phone. Hello everyone.

Of course, there are some things that just seem strange. Over the weekend, the DoCoMo user appeared to be in Canada, according to Blogger. There's also a statistically significant number of hits coming from Germany and the US, including 20 hits from a German users just today. I wonder if they're hits from a bot being redirected, or if I've picked up unexpected readers in parts foreign. Guess the only way to find out is to ask people. Leave a comment if you're visiting from Germany or the US! I'll post some full stats at the bottom for people who are interested.

In work, I'm finally getting to do some programming. There's a specialised rack in the server room called Stormtest, which has lots of digital TV receivers wired into it. I've been looking through the API, I'll have to write up some Python scripts to simulate a remote control pressing buttons. The server sends these to the machine through a little IR interface which we've stuck down in front of the receivers. I can also pull up the feed on my computer as if it was the TV, to check if everything works. It should be fun.

Tomorrow night is another get together with people from work. This time it's an international food night in Haarlem. So I'll get to try out some Spanish, Portuguese and English dishes. I'm not really sure what the English guy is hoping to bring to the table, from his countries rich culinary history, but it should be fun.

Now the stats for anyone who cares.

If you've visited me in the last month, you were using the following web browsers:
Internet Explorer 39%, Chrome 29%, Firefox 18%, Opera 7%, Java (Mobile) 3%, Safari 1%, Iceweasel <1%.
Iceweasel is based on Firefox and comes packaged with Debian Linux, so clearly some cool person computer guy came for a look once.

Visitors were using the following OSes:
Windows 88%, Macintosh 6%, DoCoMo 2%, X11 2%.
It doesn't make a great effort to distinguish here. "Windows" incorporates users of any Windows version. Similarly X11 could be any Unix-like system running the X window manager. DoCoMo is presumably a custom OS installed by DoCoMo onto its phones.

Lastly, the visitors came from:
Ireland 35%, Netherlands 27%, United Kingdom 13%, Germany 10%, United States 9%, Japan 3%, Canada 1%, Latvia <1%, Russia <1% and Israel <1%.
One hit from each of the last three. I have no idea what that's about.