Crazy Logs

Published 6 October 04 by Justin French

Top User Agents

1. Bloglines (25.38%)
2. NetNewsWire (18.07%)  
3. Mozilla (15.49%)
4. Safari (9.37%)
5. PulpFiction (6.78%)
6. Mozilla Compatible Agent (5.69%)
7. SharpReader (3.68%)
8. Internet Explorer (3.59%)  
9. NewsFire (2.98%)
10. Googlebot (2.36%)

Yes, you read correctly – my top two “browsers” (and half of the top ten) are actually news readers/aggregators, not traditional web browsers. Combined with the fact that Mozilla and Safari are so high, and IE so low, I appear to have a nice geek/Mac oriented audience who don’t even use web browsers any more!

Referrals

82% of my requests don’t have a referral, and most of the remainder comes from my signature on the TextDrive and Textpattern forums. So it would appear hardly anyone’s linking to me, which seems to support the high number of new readers in the User Agent list above.

Searches

Hardly any search terms recorded, so I mustn’t be doing well on the search engines yet (Google still hasn’t listed me at all, despite about 100 hits every month from GoogleBot). “TextMate” and “Justin French” were at the top of the search list from Yahoo.

Session Characteristics

Visitors mainly view 1 page, with the results tapering off to 6 pages – characteristic of a user who sees a new article in their news reader, clicks to read the full article, then leaves the site. The rest of Urchin’s stats are pretty useless, since it ignores Textpattern’s query-string URLs, and thinks that index.php is one page, rather than about 100 pages.

Bandwidth

I’m using SFA of my bandwidth. I think we can equally thank:

• TextDrives bandwidth compression
• a lack of any serious traffic
• CSS, minimal use of images, lean HTML files
• news readers and their respect of “not modified” headers

It’s nice to know if I get any serious linkage, I won’t have problems with bandwidth any time soon.

Summary

These logs don’t show the massive amount of traffic today and yesterday in regards to TextMate, but it’s all interesting. I’ll revisit in a few months and do a “6 month” report.

And yes, I’m fully aware that all these statistics are completely inaccurate and can’t be trusted at all – but since they’re the only stats I have (other than Textpattern’s minimalist logs), they’ll have to do.