In December 2007, I looked at this site's statistics and shared some of the things I learned. It was quite popular, so since today I looked at the site's stats for February 2009, I thought I would share some of the results again.
This time I have done things properly and processed the Apache logs with AWstats, rather than relying on Google Analytics' hit-or-miss Javascript. I then pasted the stats into Gnumeric to produce the following pie charts.
All the data used is the unique visitors for February 2009 at this site, Command Line Warriors.
1. Operating Systems
Linux is the largest operating system as you might expect, there is a small percentage of BSD also, which I have bundled in for the sake of the chart.
Still a lot of Windows users, why they are interested in this site I am not sure. Perhaps a combination of Linux fans at work/university, new people interested in free/open source software, some Windows users who are open minded enough to enjoy the site and people who are just plain lost.
2. Distributions
From the unique visitors specified in the request as Linux or BSD, I could detect the distribution for about half. The chart shows the detectable distributions that have at least 1% of total unique visitors. FreeBSD just missed out with 0.4% of the unique visitors.
3. Browsers
The following graph shows the top nine web browsers. For this chart I excluded RSS readers which are shown in a separate chart below, otherwise Liferea would have been in the top three. Firefox dominates, but other browsers get a respectable showing.
4. Browser Versions
Firefox and IE both report browser versions. So I thought it would be interesting to see the breakdown. So the next chart shows unique IE visitors, broken down into the different versions of IE:
So a fairly equal split between IE6 and IE7, with a little bit of 5 and a handful of the rest.
Firefox is a very different story, the following chart shows the unique Firefox users broken down into the different Firefox versions:
So Firefox has been far more successful at getting its users to upgrade to the latest version.
5. RSS Readers
Lastly as promised, here are the top ten RSS Readers:
Liferea has slightly under half of all RSS users, Akregator makes a strong showing, and the remainder is shared out between the rest. This chart is interesting because apart from AppleSyndication (the in-built Safari RSS Reader), none of the RSS Readers are bundled into an operating system.
Liferea has reached the premier position based solely on the quality of the software, no doubts about that.
However, I wonder if this has something to do with the readers that I have been able to catch. Straw, the official GNOME RSS reader, has almost no showing. So maybe it has been squeezed out by the also GTK-based Liferea, or it is not stable enough for people yet, or I am missing its users.
<p>I'm surprised google reader isn't in the top ten of RSS readers. Nice charts though!</p>
<p>Hi jambarama!</p>
<p>Interesting point, I had a little look into it. Google Reader comes in Awstats as "Feedfetcher-Google" under "Robots/Spiders visitors". If you count it as an RSS reader, then it is second, just pipping above Akregator.</p>
<p>Hello!</p>
<p>I'm one of the Windows visitors <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/tongue.png"> Basically I'm here because I follow news and developments on Linux every day via my Google Reader.
My company uses Linux for servers, I use it for fun and tinkering (yay for gentoo!)... hoping that it will one day finally shoo Windows from my harddrive.</p>
<p>So basically I fit into all of your presumptions but being plain lost <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/wink.png"></p>
<p>In other words, am I the only Archer?</p>
<p>Yeah, Liferea is real nice, but not your style.
Is there a command line RSS reader? Even better if it has UTF-8 support.</p>
<p>I am a die hard Google Reader user. I have yet to find a desktop app that has made me happy, while also being portable enough that I can use it on all my different computers (Ubuntu/OS X/windows).</p>
<p>As for the large amount of Windows users, I tend to visit your site while on my work computer, and I have a feeling many other people do to.</p>
<p>I agree with Garrick above windows as OS at work is probably a large contributor (I also visit the site from work regularly).</p>
<p>Yep... using Windows at work. Mainly because I haven't had the time to fully switch my desktop over to Linux here. At home, it's Debian, but I only have an hour or two each night so I don't read much at home <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/smile.png"> When I do, it's mainly on a Nokia 770.</p>
<p>erm... mac os is in the bsd family. its kernel is called darwin, which is built from NeXT, which is BSD code. I know it's a stretch but mac os really is actually a dressed-up version of bsd.</p>
<p>> erm... mac os is in the bsd family. its kernel is called darwin, which is built
> from NeXT, which is BSD code. I know it's a stretch but mac os really is
> actually a dressed-up version of bsd.</p>
<p>Actually it's heavily modified. The filesystem and the folder structure is different, the way it handles drivers, extended file attributes, program management...
The superstructure above the BSD base is so large that it is misleading to call it a version of BSD. I would say that it's an OS that is somewhat BSD compatible inasmuch you can compile good Li/U/NIX code on it, but that's about it.</p>