The view from the top

Since August, I've been keeping access logs for this site so I can have an archive of detailed statistics about browser usage, referers, and so forth. (For those with privacy concerns, consider that this is a standard procedure on most, if not all, major web sites.) I think it's interesting to see that occasionally, someone will visit my site using, say, Windows 3.1.

Browser usage is probably the most interesting statistics. Over the past few months, almost exactly two-thirds of hits to my site have been from Internet Explorer (66.7% this month), while Firefox has claimed just over a quarter (25.8%). Considering that Firefox's usage share is about twice the Internet-wide average, I must conclude that visitors to my web site are approximately twice as awesome as the average Internet user. The little blips on the browser radar are Safari (1.9%), Opera (1.9%, trailing very closely behind), unknown browsers (1.6%), Mozilla (1.0%), Netscape (0.3%), Konqueror (0.1%), and Camino (0.1%). Browsers with a share of less than 0.1% include Epiphany, K-Meleon, Galeon, and even Lynx.

The operating system stats are also interesting. This month, 91.9% of hits have come from Windows users. Windows XP alone accounts for 83.8% of the total. Only 0.9% are using Windows Vista. Less than 0.1% are using Windows 95. Only 3.1% of visitors are using Mac OS, a figure that I expected would be a little higher. Visitors using Linux account for 2.3% of the total. Among the Linux distributions that are recognized by my log file analyzer, Ubuntu comes out on top (as it did even before I switched to it). Trailing far behind are (in descending order) SUSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, and Centos. Other OSes have less than 0.1% share. They include Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS/2, WebTV, Irix, BeOS, and -- get this -- the Sony PSP.

This month, the most popular pages on the site are:

1. Ultimate Cool Characters (13,816 hits)
2. This helpful resource for our e-mail-harvesting friends (3,089 hits)
3. The Dvorak Keyboard and You (2,733 hits)
4. The main page (1,280 hits)
5. November 2003 archives (1,022 hits, probably due to this image)
6. "Where's My Trailer?" (987 hits, the biggest spam magnet for some unknown reason)
7. "Really Bad Rita" (647 hits, another big magnet)
8. Fake Cyrillic Generator (645 hits)
9. "Tornado Waste of Time" (610 hits; why do these attract so much comment spam?)
10. "Where's My Trailer Again?" (535 hits)

So I didn't get voted Most Likely to Succeed (or any other honor, for that matter) by my class, but I forgot that I still have the distinction of being on the Top 10 page on the yearbook, where they list the top 10 seniors by class rank. I've pretty much been consistently ranked #3 in the class, so last week, I got pulled out of class quickly to have my picture taken by a couple of students who were working on the yearbook. Their design for the page is to have #4-10 standing around the letters in "SUCCESS," with #1-3 looking down on them, having "the view from the top." So for this picture, all they had me do was look down and point, and that was that. It was a pleasant reminder that I am on the top... in terms of GPA, anyway.

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