Monthly Archives: August 2009

Blog Traffic

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Yesterday, a co-worker pointed out to me that the proxy/monitoring software “they” use on our network was now blocking traffic to my blog. This is something relatively recent, which made me curious about what level of traffic I get here from my work domain, particularly given that the overall traffic numbers have really never been all that impressive. Clearly, I’m serving a very discerning albeit small readership…

Google Analytics makes answering a question like that incredibly simple. I pulled traffic numbers for the period from 1 January 2009 through today, and found

  • 1,339 total visits
  • 1,958 page views
  • an average of 1.46 pages/visit
  • an average time on site of 0:00:50

Like I said, not all that impressive overall. So, what do the numbers look like for visits from my work network for that same period?

  • 97 visits
  • 1.88 pages/visit
  • an average of 0:00:37 on site

Yup, that works out to less than one visit every two days. Like I said: not all that impressive. Maybe it is the subversive nature of the content…

MMBSOD

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A co-worker's BSOD

A co-worker's BSOD

… as in multiple-monitor blue screen of death. Even more impressive (depressive?) than just a single screen. Luckily (at least for me) this wasn’t my system, but that of a co-worker. Seeing this makes me glad I haven’t had a Windows workstation as my primary system for several years.

Now before someone jumps in and starts claiming something about the smugness of Apple users, I will be the first to say that Apples aren’t perfect. I don’t miss coming back into my cubicle and find this…

Google Chrome making progress

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Google Chrome has pretty much become my browser of choice when forced to use Windows. I’ve been running the dev channel since basically the day they made it available and have only had one instance where it was unstable (basically clicking anything made it crash). I even used it for my demos during presentations last week in Chicago. It’s just faster than Firefox. By far.

I’ve been following with a great deal of interest, then, the Chrome team’s efforts to make it available on other platforms — the ones I really care about — and the things that have held me back so far has been the inability to set the size of the fonts I want it to use and the lack of support for even rudimentary plugins (e.g., Flash). I’m a small fonts (“tiny” would come closer, if you ask a couple of my overly-vocal, highly opinionated co-workers) sort of browser user and using the monstrously-huge fonts it comes preconfigured to use was painful. With each new release on the Intel Mac and Linux platforms, then, the first thing I would check would be whether they had enabled that panel under Options…

And finally today, with 3.0.196.0 on Linux, they have… of course, as is common with dev channel or alpha level software, with this huge leap forward comes a small step backward: the toolbar buttons don’t show until you hover over them, and with each page refresh they disappear again. So it’s a mixed bag, but that’s a big step forward. No joy yet on that same front on the Mac, but I’m guessing it wont be far behind.

And I saw something over the weekend in a couple of blog posts that the plugin support is coming and is far more stable than it has been to date; it’s just not enabled by default.

Edit (08/08/2009): With 3.0.197.12 (released yesterday for the Mac), plugins are now enabled, and it looks like that may be the case on Linux, as well. Now, if I could just set font sizes on Linux, this would likely be my browser of choice. It’s just faster.