January Analytics

I checked the Google Analytics for my blog this morning (31 January 2012), and I found some pretty interesting things that happened in January.

For the first time in history, there were more visits from the United States than South Africa. It seems I've gone international!

Also for the first time in history, Firefox beat out Chrome as the top browser from which people visit my blog, and Internet Explorer didn't even feature.

The most popular search term was zuma deluxe ubuntu lucid. I searched for that term, and I found that it leads to an old blog post I wrote back in June 2010, titled Running full screen games under Wine, with Visual Effects enabled. But, it only showed on the second page of the Google South Africa search results, so whoever it was, was obviously very desperate to find an answer to their question! I hope it helped...

Incidentally, I had forgotten all about that article, so I found myself wondering whether President Jacob Zuma was now using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx!

The most visited page for the month of January 2012 (not surprisingly), was the only article I had written in January, Thoughts on web apps, but it wasn't the first page that most users found. The first page that most users found (and thus ended up browsing to the web apps article) was in fact Gmail blocks my mail as Spam. I wrote that article in November 2010! Evidently, this is still an issue that frustrates users.

Google Analytics is definitely a very interesting tool....

Thoughts on web apps

I recently read this article on MyBroadband. It's all about the browser, and how it's evolved from a mere window to the web to the computing platform it is today. The author talks about how he accesses all his e-mail from www.gmail.com, he uses ChromeDeck for his social networking needs, and is using Google Docs more and more.

My response? I always did, I still now, and I think I will probably always, hate web apps!

In fact, I'm always looking for ways to spend less time in a browser.

• Why visit www.gmail.com when you can have the super-fast super featured Thunderbird (and use IMAP) running natively in your Operating System of choice?
• Why use an extension of your browser when you can have the super-fast TweetDeck running natively (well, under AIR) in your Operating System of choice?
• Why visit docs.google.com when you can have OpenOffice (or any number of other free office applications) running natively in your operating system of choice--saving to your DropBox folder, of course (for which you have the native client installed and never visit www.dropbox.com)?
• Why use a web chatting service when you can have KVIrc/mIRC/IceChat/whatever your favourite IRC client is, and chat on IRC servers?

The list goes on and on. It even grates me to have to open my browser to write this blog post, except that Linux does not yet have a suitable alternative to Windows Live Writer. This is not what the web was designed for!!

An (native) app for everything, and everything to its own app, I've always said!