60KIt was just the other day that I was talking about milestones for blogs, and it seems that today is a milestone for j2fi.net.  Shortly before arriving home from work last night, human visitor number 60,000 paid a visit!

Of course, I say “human visitor” because how often are we visited by bots, scrapers and other automated systems?  I don’t count those towards my stats, so it means that in the last 14 months since I started to seriously record site statistics, 120,000 eyes have taken a peek at my work.  What’s interesting about this number isn’t only the fact that I had never expected to have 60,000 people (or, unique IP addresses) come to this site when it was first created, but the sheer diversity in the people that have come.

Please bear with me as I run through some of the stats that have caught my attention over the last few months as I watched the counter quickly leap past 50,000 and make it’s way to the big sixty-thousand.

121 Countries And Counting

According to my IP to Geo location package, people have come from 121 countries throughout the world.  The most surprising of these visitors would be those from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lybia, Mayotte, Maldives and Malawi.  There are several other countries that I didn’t even realize had internet that have appeared on my list of nations, but the eight I listed above have surprised me the most due to the current situations in those nations.

4% Linux

Four percent of all visitors to this site have used Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris or SymbianOS when visiting.  What’s surprising about this isn’t the fact that people use Operating Systems other than Windows or Mac, but the fact that they almost all read the posts that were about Ubuntu Linux.  Before dabbling in Ubuntu, I had only seen a single hit from a Solaris user, and that was someone from Sun that had paid a visit after I had left a rather poor comment about the company on a very famous blogger’s site.

36.7% Internet Explorer

Last month I had commented on a surprising trend where the majority of visitors were using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.  It seems that of 60,000 visitors, only 36.7% of them enjoy using Internet Explorer.  A whopping 21% of which are still using IE6.  Firefox users accounted for 54.2% of all visitors while my beloved Opera browser had an abysmal showing with 0.3% of the population.

I should really do more to promote that browser….

The Power of StumbleUpon

Five pages from this site have been Stumbled, and those five pages have accounted for 51% of all traffic to this site.  Interestingly enough, February of 2008 saw more traffic to this site than the last three months of 2007 combined.  This taught me a few things about how to drive traffic to a site, and it’s part of the principles I’m using to bring traffic to a wireless computing site I’ve been supplying content for recently.

Search Strings

According to a quick mashup of search strings from everyone who has come from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search, 18% of all visitors are looking for “Jason Random”, 12% are looking for me by name, and 8% are looking for reasons why Ubuntu is so darn slow sometimes.  Unfortunately, aside from the Ubuntu articles, I can’t really write anything of value that would draw more people looking for “Jason Random”, or people looking for me by name.  Perhaps I could look at picking some keywords and targeting another area for the next 40,000 visitors.

Blog Spam

Since activating Akismet in January of 2007, a total of 6,485 comments have been marked as spam and set aside for validation or instant elimination.  While spam is nothing new to the world of blogging, I’m surprised that my spam number is so very low.  There are some bloggers that get this amount of spam filtered in their first three months, yet I need to struggle in order to earn more numbers with Akismet.  Perhaps I’m not offering spammers enough incentive to waste their time with such a random blog.

So there we have it.  After sixty-thousand unique IPs, which I’ll assume can be converted to a number of people, these are the things that I have seen within the stats.  I don’t expect this post to bring any value to anyone, but it’s interesting as heck to me, since I’m forever looking at trends in data and ways to entice more readers through the use of extremely passive advertising :P
My immediate goal now, is to follow the very same posting pattern that I’ve been working with the last three months.  That is, I want to continue writing my posts during the day while away from the computer, and then hammer them down afterwards when I get home.  While it doesn’t always work, the ability to go over my work one more time while typing it allows for any glaring grammar errors to be caught, and it also provides one more opportunity to think about what I’m saying before pushing the “Publish” button.  One of the last things I want to do is take a post down because I was too rash with some comments or criticisms.

Do You Watch Your Trends?

What I like most about watching this data slowly build over time is the sheer randomness of the data.  When I try to look at the numbers in detail, everything falls apart.  I cannot say that American readers like one thing more than another, while those from Europe like something else.  I cannot say that my Japanese readers are all Windows users who read about my political rants, nor can I say that my African readers are all English-speakers (30% are arriving on my Spanish pages).  There doesn’t seem to be a single type of article that draws the most attention, nor does there seem to be any reason behind the number of comments a post can receive.  So, even though I have all of this data, and years of experience making sense of even the most vague and disconnected sets of information, all I can say about my readers is this:  no two people are the same, and Firefox is gaining quite a bit of market share.
But then, we already knew that.

Thanks to everyone that has come to this site and given me the incentive to keep writing.  I promise I won’t write too many posts about such meaningless numbers in the future  :roll: