Unlike earlier years where I had to guesstimate and combine statistics from multiple sources, the past year was fully covered by Google Analytics. The short version is, total Kynosarges page views nearly doubled from an estimated 95,000 in 2013 to a GA-measured 173,523 in 2014. Not bad for one sad clown amazingly interesting writer!
So let’s see the Top Ten pages, starting with weblog posts. I’m listing the original publishing date and total number of non-unique views for each page.
- Light Field Photography (May 2014, 12,134 views) is a fascinating subject that attracted a surprising amount of attention, mostly through Reddit and Hacker News.
- WebView, the other JavaFX UI (December 2013, 8,518 views) got no particular sharing effort other than the usual JavaFX community syndication but still proved very popular among Java developers looking to integrate HTML UIs with their applications.
- No .NET 4.5 for XP/2003 (August 2012, 8,386 views) actually increased views from the previous year, showing how badly Microsoft blundered to kill backward compatibility in this case.
- .NET Core: Hype vs Reality (November 2014, 5,013 views) quickly became popular to the consternation of Microsoft shills. Not that open-sourcing part of .NET is bad – it’s just not nearly as awesome as Microsoft would have you believe.
- JavaFX on iOS & Android? (October 2013, 4,570 views) continued to attract attention from Java developers interested in mobile development.
- JavaFX DPI Scaling (August 2013, 4,138 views) remains an unsolved problem that seriously limits the potential of JavaFX. Interestingly, this post didn’t make the Top Ten last year – evidently a lot of Java developers have since realized this issue needs to be addressed.
- Quest for EML Viewers (April 2013, 4,021 views) more than doubled views from the last year, proving continued interest in boring old email applications.
- Oppo BDP-105D: Audiophile Blu-ray Player (January 2014, 3,501 views) You’d think this is a tiny luxury subject, but obviously it’s not. I don’t understand it either!
- Return of Patronage (December 2014, 3,023 views) got a friendly boost from John D. Cook and some social media pimping, hoisting it into the Top Ten at the last minute.
- Asus Xonar DGX on Windows 8 (February 2013, 2,801 views) increased over the previous year despite being an ancient article about a sound card that I don’t even use anymore.
Next up, we have the Top Ten hits from my static website where I host my own open-source projects, as well as articles I expect to remain relevant for a long time and get a lot of traffic.
- Rise of Nations on Windows 8 (February 2013, 20,921 views) was moved to the static website as it started to bog down the weblog. Views represent the total from both weblog and website. Remarkably, this page remains popular even after the release of the Steam Extended Edition.
- High DPI Settings in Windows (May 2011, 16,931 views) increased in popularity yet again, as Microsoft remains unable to offer a satisfying DPI scaling solution.
- Java for C# Programmers (August 2013, 8,871 views) grew more than tenfold in views, proving the enduring vitality of Java.
- WPF Drawing Performance (June 2011, 6,145 views) more than doubled in views, proving enduring interest in technologies Microsoft wants to die.
- Check .NET Version with Inno Setup (September 2012, 5,688 views) likewise more than doubled in popularity. It’s just for desktop, not WinRT tablets. Hint, hint.
- DPI Scaling in Windows GUIs (May 2013, 5,606 views) has increased eightfold as developers wake up to the importance of this issue.
- Hexkit Strategy Game System (March 2000, 1,912 views) remains popular because hey, who doesn’t like an open-source strategy game system?
- LaTeX Typesetting with MiKTeX (June 2012, 1,737 views) also more than doubled in views. What can I say, smart people visit my website and love LaTeX!
- .NET Struct Performance (June 2011, 1,516 views) dropped by half, for a change. I guess most .NET developers are not that interested in computational performance.
- Civilization V Manual Addenda (October 2010, 1,389 views) doubled in views even though I still barely cover Brave New World. Maybe Firaxis should write better manuals?
There were also some definite losers in the annual statistics, in particular the link collection pages I’ve kept on the static website since times immemorial. As virtually nobody ever looks at them I’m going to delete them during the next week or so, and merge some of the more important links & subscriptions into the reasonably popular pages (Java, Microsoft, etc.).
Random Fun Statistics
At least 60% of my total traffic referred from Google Search. Most of the rest was cross-linking from my own sites, various discussion fora & social media, or undeclared. Everything else including other search engines and feed readers is peanuts. That’s what people mean when they say Google has a monopoly – I’d instantly lose over half my traffic if Google were to blacklist me for some reason.
Over a quarter of my visitors were from the USA. Most of the rest were from Europe or the Anglosphere. India provided over 6,000 visitors and Brazil over 3,000 which remarkably exceeds Japan’s mere 2,000. Most other notable countries contributed 1,000 visitors or so. Here’s a special shout-out to the one visitor from St. Vincent & Grenadines, wherever that is!
About two thirds of my visitors were running Windows, and over half of those were using Chrome (see Google monopoly above). Firefox beats IE among the rest. Around 10% of total visits were from mobile devices, with iOS just slightly leading Android. I’m thrilled that three visits came from Xbox and PS3 browsers each, but the 14 (!) visits from SymbianOS using four different browsers (BrowserNG, Nokia, Safari, UC) clearly take the cake.