Greatest Hits in 2015

Total Kynosarges page hits as determined by Google Analytics were roughly on the same level as last year, going from 173,523 in 2014 (weblog 92,962, website 80,561) to 174,787 in 2015 (weblog 83,766, website 91,021). Here are the annual Top Ten pages, starting with weblog posts. I’m listing the original publishing date and total number of non-unique views for each page.

1. Programming Languages in 2014 (May 2015, 25,546 views) exploded for a few days when Steven Sinofsky tweeted the link, apparently due to my favorable discussion of TypeScript.
2. No .NET 4.5 for XP/2003 (August 2012, 6,229 views) lost 2,000 views from last year but actually gained second place. Just how long will XP live on?
3. WebView, the other JavaFX UI (December 2013, 5,885 views) lost 2,700 views while still surprisingly remaining the top JavaFX post on my blog.
4. JavaFX DPI Scaling (August 2013, 5,537 views) gained 1,400 views. That should decline in the future, now that this long-standing issue has finally been fixed.
5. .NET Core: Hype vs Reality (November 2014, 3,248 views) lost 1,800 views. Outside of narrow use cases or sheer open source enthusiasm, this is simply not very important.
6. Simulating Platform.runAndWait (May 2014, 2,163 views) gained 900 views and entered the Top Ten for the first time. I hear the JavaFX standard library might eventually get a similar feature.
7. Asus Xonar DGX on Windows 8 (February 2013, 1,973 views) lost 900 views but remains amazingly popular. Who knew so many people still used discrete sound cards?
8. JavaFX ListView Sizing (November 2013, 1,855 views) gained 400 views and so becomes the second JavaFX post to enter the Top Ten for the first time. Working my way up Google search results…
9. JavaFX DPI Scaling: Fixed! (June 2015, 1,806 views) combined two of my blog’s main topics to become the second 2015 post in the Top Ten.
10. Dell XPS 15 Review (February 2015, 1,579 views) covers the laptop on which I’m currently writing this post. Reviews are always popular!

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.

1. Rise of Nations on Windows 8 (February 2013, 27,877 views) gained another 7,000 views to become the most popular page overall, defeating even Steven Sinofsky’s tweet.
2. High DPI Settings in Windows (May 2011, 13,449 views) lost 3,500 views, going down in popularity for the first time. Two reasons I can think of: Microsoft has carefully hidden advanced DPI settings in recent Windows versions, and modern high-DPI screens have finally forced developers to adapt.
3. Java for C# Programmers (August 2013, 12,434 views) gained over 3,500 views. I intend to keep this reference up-to-date for Java, my only worry is that I might miss some relevant C# features as that language is evolving with breathtaking speed.
4. DPI Scaling in Windows GUIs (May 2013, 8,342 views) gained 2,700 views which just may be related to the decrease in users seeking high DPI fixes…
5. WPF Drawing Performance (June 2011, 7,284 views) gained 1,100 views while Microsoft keeps throwing one alternative (incompatible, immature) API after the other at developers.
6. Check .NET Version with Inno Setup (September 2012, 5,221 views) lost over 400 views, but then again I did let it linger without updates until recently.
7. .NET Struct Performance (June 2011, 2,452 views) surprisingly gained 900 views, after being found by some industrious developers interested in micro-benchmarking.
8. Hexkit Strategy Game System (March 2000, 1,739 views) lost nearly 200 views, even though I actually fixed a bug in a rare update!
9. LaTeX Typesetting with MiKTeX (June 2012, 1,247 views) lost 500 views. Not too many people coming fresh into LaTeX typesetting these days.
10. DITA Typesetting with Oxygen (March 2012, 716 views) actually lost over 100 views but that was enough to sneak into the Top Ten this year.

As indicated last year, I’ve finally killed off all my link collection pages which were gathering dust among the one guy per month who accidentally clicked on them, and I’m also ending the random link collection posts on my weblog. Posts with a focused theme do well, mere link lists and random grab-bags don’t. Follow me on Twitter for outrageous random links.

Random Fun Statistics

Google Search continues to provide 50-60% of all my traffic. There’s also a smattering from Bing, and the rest mostly comes from Twitter, developer forums and news aggregators, my own cross-linking, or undeclared sources. No single (declared) source contributes even a tenth of Google’s hits.

As usual, over a quarter of my visitors were from the USA. Most of the rest were from Europe including Russia or the Anglosphere. Notable exceptions are India with over 7,000 visitors (+1,000) and Brazil with 3,500 (+500). I also seem to get one annual visitor from just about every remote island anywhere in the world.

Operating systems diverged sharply between website and weblog. The website is completely dominated by Windows (84.32%), followed at great distance by Android (5.35%), Macintosh (4%), iOS (3.13%), and Linux (2.52%). Weblog visitors are much more varied: Windows (56.49%), Macintosh (13.3%), iOS (12.08%), Android (9.98%), Linux (7.15%). All other platforms are sub-1% on both website and weblog, including Windows Phone and Chrome OS.

The clearly dominant browser remains Google Chrome (54-60%), followed by Firefox (20%). These are about equal between website and weblog but the minor browsers diverge again. Internet Explorer and the rapidly adopted Microsoft Edge together account for 11.6% on the Windows-centric website but only for 7.3% on the weblog. Conversely, Safari (desktop and mobile) is much more popular on the weblog (15.9%) than on the website (all of 4.5%).