Thursday 5 April 2012

The weekly ups and downs

So I noticed in the analytics graphs an obvious pattern emerge on my google code pages, which is probably due to the hit-rate getting high enough to rise above the noise (the point of which incidentally coincides with when I put up a test release of jjmpeg).

(the numbers have been truncated)

The pattern seems to have been there before, but now it's glaringly obvious. And that is that people are hitting the site only on during working days in the USA (there aren't enough hits yet to determine if there is a trend in the hours too).

So I wonder what that means; it is just working people looking for some free code? Students doing class-work? It seems to suggest that hobby programmers are probably not that interested in it; or that the vast majority only hack during the week-days (which i don't think likely, not to this extent). The only communications i've received have been from cost-free-code snarfers and students, so at least that data point correlates - although the sample is so small it doesn't amount to hard data.

Well whilst i'm on statistics of the site I'll dump a few other observations:

  • Rather modest numbers for a-hackers-craic: I broke 2K posts/month for the first time last month, and also broke 20K for its lifetime.
  • I always find it pretty funny how many people searching for an image of 'g-spot' end up loading the picture on one of my rant posts. It's a photo of an ibm keyboard. It's usually in the top-10 searches for the month!
  • Java FFT is still high on the search hit-rate.
  • Beagleboard/XBMC still gets plenty of hits even though I haven't worked on it or posted about it for over a year. The XBMC wrap-up post is usually in the top 10 for the month
  • Together the java fft and beagleboard xbmc wrap-up post are over 10% of all hits of the life-time of the blog.
  • More direct searches either for my name, the blog or the projects i have on google code. jjmpeg being fairly useful is an obvious reason, but also from more activity in various forums (e.g. opencl), and more consistently using my URL or google login for drive-by commenting elsewhere.
  • My google code projects are now my top referrers, although having a link off the Aparapi project added a good number of hits.
  • I get a lot of hits on rambling mind-dump posts which don't contain particularly useful information: like `opencl images and arrays', or 'sse gcc and amd'.
  • Quite a few people seem to be interested in 'kobo hacking'. But going by the lack of interest on the forums for anything other than a plugin to enable a few simple features, and no communications on my efforts, I would presume they're more interested in removing the advertising from the advertising-subsidised version, or cracking the drm.

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