More Stats

After last week's Bitcoin Paywall comic was posted on Reddit, hits to my comic reached new levels. At first I didn't know where all the additional traffic was coming from, so I improved my stats page to let me see the top referring URLs and top comics accessed in the past day.

The most important thing I learned from the stats is that I shouldn't look at the stats.

First of all, I worry that the comic is not getting enough traffic some days. Is it not well-publicized? Do people just not like it? Am I a failure? And on days when it does get lots of traffic, I tell myself that it's not enough.

Why should I care? I do the comics because I need a creative outlet. I went 20 years without writing a frog comic and it bothered me. I bought amphibian.com in 1997 with the intention of putting comics on it and never did until 2014. Now I don't know why I waited so long. Some of them are bound to be more popular than others, but I write them for myself - not for anyone else. If people like them, that's great. If they don't, that's fine too. My kids like them. Well, most of them.

Secondly, I noticed that I get a lot of "referer" (yes, it's a misspelling of "referrer" and it's really that way in HTTP headers) sites that are very suspicious and almost always Russian. When used properly, the HTTP "referer" header is supposed to tell me the URL that had a link to me and was followed by a user. But these sites have no such links to me. When I first saw this, I went to some of the sites - and regretted it. They are clearly not operated by anyone who has a legitimate interest in linking to frog-related entertainment.

So what's up with that? I can only conclude that they are some kind of bots who feed me bogus referer data. Really, with the content of web pages all advertisements and the web readers all bots, is there anything useful on either end of the Internet these days?

And so I have a new slogan, one that will really differentiate my site from everything else out there:

Amphibian.com: Almost Completely Legitimate Content!

And in today's comic, the frogs pick a logo to go with that slogan...

Amphibian.com comic for 27 May 2015

What My Users Are Using

Since I got a request to show some of Amphibian.com's user agent stats after Monday's post, I decided to put some information together and share it today. There are a few surprises.

These numbers are based on the agent strings for the last week. I had a pretty good week for traffic, due no doubt to my guest-authorship of Tavern Wenches on Monday.

First, let's look at the coarse-grain browser usage.

• Firefox: 24.61%
• Chrome: 29.78%
• Internet Explorer: 15.38%
• Safari: 1.97%
• Other: 28.25%

What is "Other"?  Mostly just spiders and bots. There sure are a lot of them though. But over half of the traffic is people using Firefox or Chrome, which is great to see.

Now to break it down some more. What versions of the browsers are being used? I'll start with Firefox.

• version 35: 36.64%
• version 3: 30.31%
• version 6: 15.99%
• version 31: 7.66%
• version 28: 2.41%
• version 26: 1.08%

All other versions were less than 1% each of all Firefox traffic. It's no surprise that 35 is the most common, since up until 3 days ago it was the current version. What's really shocking is that version 3 is the next most common! It dates back to June of 2008. But it was also before the automatic upgrade process, which is why so many people are stuck on it. Leaks memory like mad though. Version 6 was also popular and came out before the forced updates, back in August of 2011. It didn't make the cutoff since it was less than one percent, but there was one comic accessed with Firefox 2. Whoever you are, please upgrade. The good news: Firefox has always had pretty good SVG support, so almost all of these people are seeing the frog comics more-or-less correctly. Even CSS3 Transforms, which I use relatively often, were supported the whole way back to 3.5.

Chrome is next.

• version 40: 78.65%
• version 39: 7.30%
• version 38: 7.16%
• version 36: 1.90%
• version 35: 1.12%
• version 30: 1.90%

All other Chrome versions were used less than 1% each. Thanks to Chrome's excellent automated update process, the vast majority of users are on the current version, released on 21 January 2015. There were 2 comics accessed from Chrome 41, which is currently in the beta channel. You are awesome, whoever you are. The oldest version of Chrome used was 10, released in March of 2011. Even that person got to see the frog comics almost perfectly. Chrome is my browser of choice and has always supported SVG graphics and CSS3 transforms.

Now how about those IE users?

• version 6: 11.74% (fail!)
• version 7: 1.66% (fail!)
• version 8: 69.48% (fail!)
• version 9: 1.66%
• version 10: 9.53%
• version 11: 5.94%

Booooo! That's right, IE 8 is still the most common IE used to visit Amphibian.com. Those folks are leaving disappointed. As are all those people using 7 and 6. Come on, people! IE 6?!?! Really? That browser's older than dirt! That browser nearly killed the web! Ugh. Anyway, the 17% of IE users who come with 9, 10, or 11 will be fine. The site looks presentable in 9 and should be perfect in 10 and 11. Internet Explorer's SVG support started in 9, but not all of the things I do with CSS3 are supported until 10. It degrades rather well though.

Safari doesn't show up enough to be significant, but almost everyone using it is on version 8.

The one other thing I like to look at is operating system. Since I went to the trouble of optimizing Amphibian.com for mobile devices, I'd like to see more mobile browsing of it. So far, though, I'm not doing so well in that area.

• Windows: 58.98%
• Mac: 4.48%
• iOS: 3.25%
• Android: 6.21%
• Linux: 3.41%
• Other: 23.67%

Again, "Other" shows up in a large number. It's the spiders and bots. Which is fine, I guess. One of the other design concerns with my site is how the frog's words are just P tags and can therefore be indexed by the search engines. But back to the real people - there are relatively few viewing the comics on mobile devices. Windows is by far the most popular. I am pleasantly surprised to see over 3% on Linux though.

Enough of the statistics now, back to the comics!

Amphibian.com comic for 27 February 2015