Google Analytics Reports

You’re in for an exciting treat: Results from Google Analytics! Wow! These are results for visits from August 5 (when I first started using GA) to August 24 (when I meant to post this).

(*See note about Google Analytics and privacy.)

Visitors From Around The World

These first three maps show where everyone is coming from. This has been the best part for me — I’m thrilled to see people stopping by from all over the world. I hope you find something that makes you want to visit again or even regularly.

Some of the dots represent scum-of-the-earth spammers. I’ve had 9 spam comments so far that have all been caught by Akismet. So I wonder — just a little bit — which of the dots were filthy spammers, but overall I don’t worry about it. (It’s more disconcerting that Akismet reports handling 175 million comments since it began, of which 165 million have been spam.)

Not surprisingly, the United States has a lot of dots. The big dot obscuring most of Minnesota is for Minneapolis, where I have a semi-captive audience that I can coerce in to visiting. It’s great to see so many visitors from Europe also. Just as exciting is that a scattering of people from South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia have also taken the trouble to click on a Moving to Freedom link somewhere. And look, there was someone from South Africa, for which I’ve employed specialized plate tectonics manipulation to move the lower part of the continent in to a more compact map for your viewing convenience.

We conclude our geographical reporting with this pie chart showing the breakdown by country:

But wait! There’s more!

Traffic Flow

Next let’s look at some charts that reveal the modest level of traffic that Moving to Freedom currently receives. Traffic? What kind of way is that to talk about you, my loyal readership? Perhaps you’d like to be referred to as eyeballs.

Anyway, I want to promote this site and gain readers, but only good readers, like you, the one who is reading this right now. If it takes a while to build up an audience, that’s just fine. So here I proudly share my humble statistics. You can say that you were here in the early days and I’m sure it will speak very well to your reputation. (I’ll also mention that the stars are aligning and soon I may have the opportunity to drive many more eyeballs to the site.)

Look, we can already see a pattern emerging from the data:

A spike in visits on the days that a new post shows up. Who would have thought? The first peak is higher, probably because of comments I made on one or two articles at Free Software Magazine. The articles both received a number of diggs at digg.com and I think the added readership spilled over even to my backwater little web site.

Free or Unfree?

Now for a couple of charts of interest to the question of free versus proprietary software. Not surprisingly, given the subject of this blog and with FSM driving so much of my traffic, Mozilla Firefox wins out over Internet Explorer. For the 22% of you using IE, maybe some of you are constrained by what you have on a work machine, but I’m sure some of you have the power to move to the freedom of Firefox.

I’m curious what these charts would look like for other web sites. I’m guessing for the Minneapolis StarTribune, IE would have at least a 70% share, while for techie sites in general I think it’s safe to guess that Firefox will be in the 50% range or more.

I can’t be so pious on the next one. I’m with the 67% Microsoft Windows shackled majority. While it is my professed goal to move to GNU/Linux, you’ll notice I’m not reporting a lot of progress on that journey. I’ll have to work on it lest word get out that I’m all hat and no cattle. Probably not even hat, for that matter.

These charts suggest to me that you’ll get more people using a free (and better!) alternative when it’s easier to do so. It’s a lot easier to install Firefox on Windows than it is to use a whole new OS. (In my opinion, of course.)

I mentioned last week that I’m helping my sister build a web site. It’s completely non-technical and will be interesting to see what her browser and platform numbers look like. If she doesn’t mind, I’ll share some charts here eventually. Do you even care? It’s hard for me to know what constitutes a general interest item and what has more limited appeal based on my small little world. Maybe you’re more interested in statistics for big sites. I like to read about how many millions of page views some sites get per day. If that’s your kind of thing also, then you better get to work and help promote movingtofreedom.org so I’ll have more impressive numbers to report. Spread the word far and wide. (“Hey! Check out this web site that prattles on endlessly about nothing in particular!”) Mmmmm… Triple digit daily visitor counts…

Real Estate (or: Screen Resolution)

And this one is enlightening to me from the perspective of how I design the web site. I use 1280×1024 but try to get things to look ok for as small as 1024×768. For the 800×600 people, I think you’re struggling in general so hopefully the skinny middle column you find here isn’t too dreadful.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have 2048×1536 pixels worth of screen real estate? I don’t worry too much about making things look right at window sizes wider than 1280 pixels. I doubt the 1600×1200 and 2048×1536 people are browsing the web with their windows maximized. If you are, I’m guessing the worst you might see on this site are “floating” images that intrude into adjoining sections, but I think that would be the least of your readability/usability concerns with such a wide window.

I was very fortunate recently here at MTF Central. The war department approved the purchase of a second monitor which I’ve since acquired, rotated vertically, and am viewing at 1024×1280. It’s simply awesome for web pages. I think you gain a lot more by having additional vertical space rather than additional horizontal. For one, a lot of sites don’t let their content flow to fill the entire horizontal space anyway, and for two, it’s easier to read narrower columns. I can take in so much more with my additional 256 vertical pixels (actually even more since I don’t have a taskbar on this display). There’s much less scrolling. It appears that people are optimizing their sites for 1024-pixel-wide resolutions so that pages don’t seem cramped. It all seems more proportional now. This was the missing link to web browsing nirvana.

So there you have it. Please return soon. If all goes well, there may even be another post this weekend!

* I wanted to point out again — maybe for the last time, but probably not — that it is in your power to prevent Google Analytics from collecting information about you. Or at least certain kinds of information. It is fairly simple to prevent the GA script from running. Search for “block google analytics” and you’ll find plenty of information. If you have concerns about your privacy, I urge you to take the steps to block GA rather than give up on Moving to Freedom. Is this a lot to ask from you? Why should you have to go through this effort to browse (slightly more) anonymously? Well, it’s not just me doing this. There are a lot of sites out there using Google Analytics and other services like Site Meter. (Including Slashdot, I was interested to discover recently. They use GA.) If it’s a big deal to you then you should already have taken action. In which case, as usual, I’ve said too much. I just want you to know I take this stuff seriously, especially with the recent AOL search data debacle to serve as an example of the consequences of shoddy privacy stewardship.