Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Happy 4th Anniversary Honest Hypocrite - more statistics on page loads

There are still more fun statistics to be digested as part of the 4th Anniversary celebration of the Honest Hypocrite. As I mentioned earlier, I use StatCounter to visitors and page views to this blog. Using the page load statistics from StatCounter we can look at all 150,000 or so page loads and see a histogram of the fraction of days with a given number of page loads.

I have expanded the longer tail region so that the 3800 page load and the 2000 page load days are visible. Still this blog has received on average of about 150 page loads a day.

Interestingly it might be better to look at the page loads for the past year as a function of the day of the week. I have chosen the past year because the page load rate has been fairly steady and the results won't be confounded by the page load growth year over year.

I have shifted each week's curve up by 20 in order to make the trends easier to see. There are 52 instances of each day in the past year tabulated on the chart (click the chart above for bigger). Monday is by far the most popular day with Saturday being the least. I suspect that this represents the regular ebb and flow of Internet usage.

Statcounter keeps the last 500 page loads and statistics such as where a user came from or search terms used. Using a view of StatCounter's past 500 for this blog from today, only 45 out of 476 page loads are from users with no referring link, they came to this blog without being directed by link or search. 390 out of that 476 came from a google search, either the US or the various country variants and of those 133 came from an image search. These results are probably the most pure seasonally unaffected results, since we are not near any holidays (Groundhog's Day is a favorite), or sporting events (March Madness, Football playoffs). Thus the searches are the regular ones.

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