January by the Numbers

Visits were down a bit this month from last at 337. Not surprising given that we are now both working and we keep finding cool things to watch on Hulu.com in what little free time we have. A touch over 44% of those visits were referred here from another site, and over half of those were from Facebook. But a substantial 20% came from reciprocal links and track backs on other people's blogs, which is kind of cool.

On the operating system front, XP still dominates everything else at 53.1%. All Microsoft OS's combined account for 79.6% of visits. I remain surprised at the weakness of Win 7 (3.9%) vs. Vista (21.7%). I know the upgrade is costly, but trust me, it is well worth it. Mac and iPhone accounted for 13.3% combined, with Other, Linux and Blackberry picking up the scraps.

The browser wars continue with January clearly going to IE 8 with 41.2%. IE 6 and 7 only added another 6.6% showing that people are wising up and getting onto IE 8. All versions of Firefox pulled in 31.2%, and Mozilla 5, Safari, Chrome and Other covered the rest.

My own little browser war continues as well. I grew weary of Chrome's bugs and even went as far as unpinning it from my task bar (it has since returned). Sure Firefox was a CPU hog, but at least things worked. Then Firefox 3.6 was released and my CPU usage when running just Firefox dropped by a third. Chrome came out with a new release of its own, which I dutifully installed only to find the same bugs that drove me nuts still there. I assume they will get fixed eventually, but for now, I would just as soon avoid the hassle and use Firefox. The problem for Google is that Firefox isn't a stationary target; the Firefox developers are busy incorporating most of what attracts people to Chrome while keeping all the things that made Firefox popular in the first place. Chrome may yet turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Firefox.

I don't get a lot of traffic from the search sites, but what I do get usually results from search terms that are somewhat interesting. My favorites this month: "canadian supplier of koegel hot dogs" and "arcosanti shit." Which probably says all that needs to be said about this blog.

Well, I woke up way too early this morning and need a nap.