Ohloh Blog

We love Google analytics. It's lets you find out so much about who visits your site, what they look at, what got them to come to your site, what browser they're using and so much more.

So here are some interesting stats for the last two weeks of July:
-heise.de, a German news aggregation and threaded discussion site, produced about the same number of referrals as Slashdot. And, indeed, we had almost as many German visitors as American ones. Go Germany!
-Also the Italian site, Punto Informatico generated a lot of traffic for us. Go Italy!
-The top browser was Firefox with about 65% of all visitors to our site using it, then Internet Explorer with about 25%, followed by Opera with 5%, Safari with 2.5% and Konqueror with about 2%.
-OSs looked like this. Windows at about 76% (about 85% of that XP, 10% 2000 and then a smattering of older Windows versions), Linux at about 17% and Mac at about 6%.
-Search engine use was pretty interesting, too. It seems that Google is the search engine of choice for our audience. Across all users Google was used 95% of the time, MSN 3% and Yahoo! 2%. And things don't look too good for MSN at Microsoft either, since 88% of the searches coming from the microsoft.com domain used Google with only 12% using MSN search. That's tough if you don't have superior marketshare in your own company! The same cannot be said of Google and Yahoo! where 100% of the searches originating from those domains used their respective search engines.

--Scott

P.S. To reach me directly you can e-mail me at scott@ohloh.net.

I was busy putting finishing touches on our app last week and didn't put much too thought into what to expect from our launch. Obviously I was hoping for lots of traffic and interest, but wow - I really didn't expect the suddenness of it all. While it's gratifying to see people interested in our app, it's also a testament to just how fast these little tubes that make up the Internet are (sorry, couldn't help it!). Here are some of my impressions:

Technology

Our website is built on Ruby on Rails using an entirely open source stack (linux/postgres/lighttpd and a bunch of ruby gems). The fcgi's became comatose with the initial slashdot effect on Monday (what a rude thing to do to a developer - slashdot at 6am?). After killing and restarting them, they've since held up problem free. The rest of the moving parts have thankfully been trouble free. What initially felt like a technology gamble (going with open source everything) has since proven to be a no-brainer.

User Feedback

I was completely blown away. The quantity and quality of people writing in has been a huge eye-opener for me. I'm still scratching my head in amazement at the thoughtful, insightful and voluminous mail we've received. It's become a challenge to respond to all of them with the same amount of energy that the authors put into writing them, but so far I am keeping up and will try to maintain the pace. BTW, I respond to the product/web/general design questions.

Slashdot Feedback

I haven't read the feedback thread yet (although friends couldn't help giving me their summary: "dude - you got spanked for being ex-Microsoft!"). I'll leave this topic for my next post.

Meanwhile, if you have blog topics you'd like us to write about or want to reach me directly, here's my email: jason@ohloh.net.

We have now started rapidly gaining traffic. The user feedback has been super helpful for us, so, please, keep it coming! It really gives us guidance on how we will improve our service.

After indexing a few thousand open source projects, we've quietly taken our open source measurement service live this week. As we continue to map the open source world, we're eager to discover how you will respond to being able to see what's happening with projects you're interested in. We think it's important that our measurements on open source projects don't stand alone, so we've indexed thousands of projects. Give us your feedback, since we are eager to provide you with the service that you want when you want to evaluate an open source project. Also, suggest a project that you want to see. We're happy to go get it for you.

Oh, and one more thing. The intent of this blog is to give folks updates on the service. So, we will have various people in our little company post to this blog when something comes up.

--scott