A brief review of blog traffic for the past year

I don’t pay as much attention to blog traffic for FML as I probably should. I know there are a lot of things I could improve if I paid more attention to the various details. Instead, I tend to look for trends and broad numbers and that’s about it.

This evening I checked summary statistics from Google Analytics for the past year. Here is what I found:

  • There were 6,713 unique visitors to the site, which averages out to about 18.4 visitors per day
  • Visitors tend to spend only about a minute on the site each visit
  • The browser used by visitors breaks down as follows:
    • Internet Explorer – 46.51%
    • Firefox – 41.53%
    • Safari – 9.65%
    • Mozilla – 1.02%
    • Netscape – .48%
  • Traffic sources include 38.36% of visitors who find FML via search engines; 31.68% who go directly to the site (in other words, the site is bookmarked or the URL is typed in directly); and 27.42% of traffic comes from referring sites. Of the 38.36% of visitors who find FML via a search engine, the vast majority of them uses Google (over 80%).
  • The vast majority of visitors uses Windows as their operating system (80.45%). 17.93% use Mac OS X. 1.38% use Linux.

I am especially pleased at the good showing for non-IE browsers. Something else that is of interest is what keywords people use in a search engine that leads them to FML. Here are some of the top keywords, aside from the obvious ones such as “family man librarian”: “portable browsers”, “everyone has a double”, “library related wordpress theme” and “praise you in the storm.”

[tags]blog traffic, google analytics[/tags]

Using comics to promote free or open source software use (Updated)

Tectonic — Linux and open source news

I was notified of this news item via a PubSub alert and I’m glad I took a look at it. This blog (Tectonic: Africa’s Source for Open Source News) entry talks about a method for getting the word out about free or open source software in Namibia. The problem appears to be with teachers or educators, who don’t seem to know much about what is freely available for classroom use. If you find this interesting enough to follow the link (above), be sure to click on the graphic showing a comic. I did, and found mention of things like Wikipedia, OpenOffice, and Project Gutenberg. Interesting!

Many people don’t stop to think about the international benefits of these kinds of projects. I know that many librarians in third world countries are very interested in or are already using open source library software like Koha. A few years ago, I met with two librarians from Kenya, Charles and [Daniel], for the purpose of helping them (along with colleagues from Wheaton College, who were much more heavily involved with them, e.g. in sponsoring their U.S. trip) investigate Koha and/or other free software that they could use to automate their libraries. Charles and [Daniel] are leaders in the library world in that country. I hope that they and others are also paying attention to open-ils.org, a.k.a. the Evergreen Project in the state of Georgia here in the U.S.