Analysis¶
859 words
Being a bit curious anyway and partly inspired by the trend of new year log analysis, we took a closer look at our web site's log files yesterday.
We sort-of kept track of the general ups and downs in popularity using the tools provided by our web-hoster's administration site but this was a good time to actually dig a bit into analog. Let me get over with the unfriendly bits first: I don't really like analog. The configuration seems obscure to me at best and it doesn't seem to do the things I am interested in, whilst giving me lots of information I don't want. One thing I'd be interested in would be having the daily or weekly downloads of each of our apps listed. I did achieve that, but only by having a configuration file for each of the applications, together with an extra analog run and an extra web page to view - not very convenient. I didn't read all of the documentation but enough to get fed up with it… so I can only hope there's a better way to do this.
Now let me recap some of the results. The first, unsurprising, one is that we don't get millions of hits. Then, for our apps, most external direct download referrers come from Versiontracker and Mac Update, the former outnumbering the latter by quite a bit. Not a big surprise either. And although all of our applications are insanely great, downloads aren't huge. There's a big surge of a couple of hundred downloads the day a new version is released and downloads only trickle afterwards, with a couple of downloads per day for GeburtstagsChecker, slightly higher numbers for UnicodeChecker and a few dozen downloads per day for Ballerburg.
Basically I don't get that. The first two of these applications are quality software that everybody who uses it praises, so you'd think the numbers should be higher. Our theory is that some English-speaking people are put off by the German name of GeburtstagsChecker. I guess they deserve missing out on one of the nicest birthday reminders that gets its information straight from the OS X.2 address book if desired. Then comes UnicodeChecker, which actually does quite well, considering that it isn't aimed at a broad audience but rather at the pro-user or web-developer crowd for whom Apple's character palette isn't enough. In fact UnicodeChecker does provide many more features such as conversion (interactive, via services and even in AppleScript for HTML), decomposition, finding Unicode characters by their name and more strange hex numbers than you'd want to know about. The latest, January 3, update saw a huge surge in downloads....
On the account of Ballerburg we were a bit disappointed to find our theory well-founded that many of the people downloading the app were Windows users. We've added an explicit ‘system requirements’ bit on the download pages since for those people who can't tell that we're not talking about a Windows application by looking at the icon, screenshots or text on our web page. Still, people seem to like the game. They better do, as I know that Steffen made quite an effort to preserve the nice retro-feeling while making it prettier at the same time.
Another 
funny feature of the log analysis is that it tells us what people were searching for when being referred to our site from a search engine. This drew our attention to the fact that there are around 20 downloads a day of the various PDF files on our site, containing essays or papers from university. It hadn't occured to us that those could actually be of interest. Modern PDF-scanning search engines seem to do the trick here. The most popular one is Steffens German paper on multimedia file formats.
Finally there is of course my little blogging enterprise here. And - gasp - there are actually some readers. Hi there, by the way. It looks like you're well into two digit numbers now and while I couldn't offer everyone a seat, I should be able to fit all of you into our flat. Most importantly, there seem to be more humans than robots and search engines reading this. Hooray. Many of you are using Windows computers to read this, but the proportion of Mac and Unix/Linux people is higher than the respective market share of the platforms. A couple of you even seem to enjoy the benefit of my RSS feed. I hope I didn't make any big mistakes to upset your reading application. And last but not least there are the search enging queries that lead to these very pages: The by far most popular one is, again unsurprisingly, ‘quarter life crisis’. In fact a little reasearch shows there is more to quarter life crisis blogging than me. Perhaps I should e-mail some of those people? Probably people were actually looking for the book by the same name, I suspect. I really love the second, fourth and seventh most popular search queries, though
baby come dance with me on TV at the TV station
People searching for Adam Green lyrics. Cool.
