As of today, Linux Loop is now 1 year old. At the beginning it was a tutorial and an ocasional link to another story with a couple sentences about it. Now, just one year later, it is daily news. With this transition, Linux Loop has also grown a lot. From only a handful of visits a day at the beginning, Linux Loop has come a long way up to hundreds or thousands of visits each day. Below are some stats:
As of today, LinuxLoop.com has recieved over 175,000 unique visitors and well over 200,000 visits.
As I have said before, LinuxLoop.com has received at least one visit from every country in North and Central America, every large to medium country in Europe, and every country in South America except French Guiana (if you know any friends…)
The most common screen resolution is 1280×1024 at about 27%. This happens to be my screen resolution, so that is probably why it is #1.
The number of people who have visit this site between 100 and 200 times is 599. (Yes, there are people who have been here more than that.)
All stats come from Google Analytics.
I look forward to another great year of Linux Loop, hopefully including a new site!
I am currently working on a new version of Linux Loop based on the Drupal content management system. I am not going to go into the details of why I want to move to Drupal right now, but I hope to explain that later in some other post. For now, you can check out the site at the address below:
WARNING: The site is incredibly ugly right now and is rapidly changing. It is in no way a final site.
All feedback would be appreciated, but, at this point, please don’t send me broken links, things that look ugly, and that sort of thing. That will come later.
I have just finished upgrading everything to WordPress 2.6 as well as upgrading a few plugins. Sorry if you experienced any downtime. Anyway, I am excited to be be on 2.6 now. This video shows some of the new features:
I have just changed the settings on the (relatively few) ads on this site to allow image ads as well as text ads. I am just trying it out, so if you find it annoying, please leave your feedback here.
Today I published my 300th Linux news story! Having reached this landmark and approaching Linux Loop’s one year anniversary, I decided to share some stats and a quick look at the future of this site.
First, some stats (all stats are according to Google Analytics):
This site has received over 120,000 unique visitors and almost 190,000 page views.
The site has been visited from every country in North America and Central America, all but one country in South America, every major country in Europe (meaning every country that you can easily see on a map), Australia, and many countries in Africa and Asia.
Over 50% of visits to this site came from Windows machines (sheesh…) with Linux in the #2 spot at not quite 40%.
Firefox is the top browser used to visit this site at around 74% with IE at around 12%.
Now, a quick look at the future:
Currently, this site uses a combination of static HTML and WordPress. I like WordPress a lot, but it is not designed for sites that are more than just a blog and trying to manage a combination of static HTML and two WP installations is really, really annoying. My idea is to move to a more full-featured CMS (content management system) such as Drupal that could handle the whole site.
This would largely just mean a new look for the site, but it could also mean some change in content, since it would be much easier to publish non-news articles. If I decide to go ahead and move to Drupal, I will probably put up a poll about what type of content you are most interested in (news, tutorials, reviews, comedy, anything else you can think of.) If you have any thoughts, of course, I am happy to hear them now, too, though.
In short, the site is continuing to grow, though it is still relatively small, and the future looks great!
Hope you continue to enjoy the site and the content!
On an earlier post, I discussed the idea of doing a live, interactive distribution review. Well, we are doing it. Here are the details:
I will be using a live distro review. I will be installing and starting to use OpenSuse 11 and posting my thoughts - live. Hopefully others will join me and post their thoughts as well.
The event will be taking place on Friday, June 20 (the day after OpenSuse 11 is released) at 3:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time (12:30 PM PDT.) To find out what time that is for you, click here.
Most reviews work something like this: a reviewer plays with a product or piece of software and writes what they think of it. Particularly with something like a Linux distribution where the artwork can be a big piece of it and where one person can have some random issue with their hardware, the old method of reviews does not really work very well. That is why I am planning, if there is enough interest, to try a new type of review. I am planning to live blog an upcoming distro release (probably OpenSuse 11) and while I am installing and playing with the distro, viewers (hopefully you) can also install and play with the distro and give their comments, which can then be published into the live blog.
The idea is that the distro will not just be reviewed by one person, but by as many people as wish to contribute. Instead of publishing a review and then being told why I am wrong, I can be told why I am wrong, or right, in real time.
As I said before, though, this will only work if there is enough interest. If you would be interested in participating in a live, group review of OpenSuse 11 on June 19 or the day after, please vote below. You don’t have to commit, I just want a general idea of the interest level.
As some of you may have noticed, this site was down for a little while yesterday. Sorry. My web host, Lunarpages, had to shut down some servers temporarily, including the one this site was on. I have been a customer of Lunarpages for almost two years now and this is the first time I have seen any real down time, so I am not really concerned and certainly not planning on changing hosts or anything like that. I was also impressed with how they handled the outage. I received an e-mail the next day explaining what happened, which I was very happy to see.
Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope it does not happen again.
Yesterday this website reached 100,000 all-time unique visitors! I am very excited about what this site has been and what it will be in the future. Thanks to everyone who has visited this site and please keep coming back!
