Quick historical overview

• This website http://perso.crans.org/besson is hosted by the personal pages at CRANS (student association in charge of the Internet connexion on the campus of the ENS Cachan superior school).
• It has been available on-line with this form, since March 2013 (and it's an open source project, its source code is available on this git repository).
• This website is powered by Sphinx, to generate a static website (i.e., some HTML and CSS files, a few JavaScript files), from files written in plain text, in the rST markup language.
• From the beginning, even with the ethical questions this raised, I decided to use Google Analytics. I wanted to move to Piwik from a while, but the hosting server for this website does not support it...

And so, from the last 22 Mars 2013 this website hosts pages and got visitors on a daily basis, and I have a partial access to a few statistics on these visits (cf. the first commit).

---

Overview of this article:

• The next part of this article gives a small overview of these data, by analyzing quickly the main statistics.
• Please note that this article has only been written in order to be informative and to respect my constant will to be fully transparent. This article was not meant to be pretentious, or to give any confidential information (Google Analytics only keeps anonymous data, in fact (in a weird way...)).

Main statistics

These stats have been simply summed from the data last accumulated during the last 3 years (March 2013 - March 2016).

• 27000 visits, it is about an average of 25 visits every day (but it includes visits from web-bots and crawlers so it might be over estimated...),
• 51000 pages served; and, weirdly, this page in French (see its translation) brings about 10% of visits, and this other one in English get about 5% of the visits,
• and a ratio of 83% of new users vs known users.

Geographical origins:

• 157 different countries (almost all!) in 3 years. But it's pretty consistent, I get in average about 100 different countries (e.g., 110 in the first 6 weeks in 2016). Most of these countries sent less than 10 visitors, and 33 sent a user only once! Just 22 countries emitted more than 100 visits, and without surprise, the first 5 countries share about 75% of the visits (by decreasing order, France 45%, USA 20%, Russia 7%, India 4% and UK 3%),
• 5 different continents (I catched them all!), with 60% from Europe, 23% from America, 10% from Asia and only 1% from Oceania,
• 21 different sub-continents (I catched them all!), about the same repartition (West Europe got 45%, Northern Europe about 15%),
• 3152 different cities (... that's a lot, but there is so many of them!). The ten most important ones are "unkwown/unspecified" (25% !), Paris (7%), Cachan (France, 6%), Samara (in Russia, there is surely a web-bot or a crawler there, 3%), London (3%), Hyderabad (India, 2%), Toulouse (France, 1%), Bangalore (0.9%), New York (0.8%) and Rennes (France, 0.8%). Just on these top ten cities, we clearly see the effect on the number of visits of my current and past presence in a country or city (as I lived in Paris, Cachan, London and Hyderabad between 2013 and 2016), and from huge "high-tech" cities (New York and Bangalore), and "important spots" of the research in maths and computer science in France (Rennes and Toulouse).

Languages : French has 40%, English has 25%, "unknown/not specified" has 25% (!), and Russian, Spanish and others got 10%.

Other statistics

Browsers repartition (which follows the the global evolution of the repartition of web-browsers):

• 52% of the users visiting this website are browsing with Google Chrome (but every one knows that Firefox is the best browser!),
• Mozilla Firefox has 28% (sadly...),
• Apple Safari has 10%,
• and the rest few percents are shared by Internet Explorer (3%), Opera (2%), and other smaller browsers.

Devices repartition : laptops (90%) vs mobiles (8%) vs tablets (1%).

Mean duration of the visits : about 2 minutes (that's about half the time to read the longest of my articles, and about the time to read any of the medium-size article hosted here, so it's a good sign: visitors are really reading these pages!).

Referrer : Google (45%), "direct access" (42%, this includes the various anonymous search engine, mainly the wonderful DuckDuckGo), Facebook (5%), http://lbesson.bitbucket.org (3%), http://crans.org (2%) and http://www.mahindraecolecentrale.edu.in/ (1%).

More images

Have a look to this folder for a pretty image gallery, showing more examples and figures, in pictures.

Other website?

This website is the one that gets most of the visitors (on web pages written by me), but I have some pages with Google Analystics enabled on other websites:

• Some projects hosted on this same domain (perso.crans.org/besson) have a different Google Analytics key, so they are showed on a separate GA database ("view"), but they all have very few visitors.
• My Bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/lbesson and http://lbesson.bitbucket.org/ got about 5000 visits in 3 years (and this small game is responsible for 20% !),
• My documents for the "Computer Science" course that I taught in a MP prep' school (in Sceaux (France) in 2015-16, got about 400 visits, for 1200 pages seen and about 290 different users, since August 2015 (so they have some recurrent visitors, that's a good sign showing that my students are using these documents!),
• A tiny Python module I wrote in 2013, ANSIColors, its code and its doc, receives about 1100 visits since I put them online (February 2013) - it's ridiculously small but who cares! I updated it to support Python 3 in June 2016: ansicolortags: its code (ansicolortags) and its doc (ansicolortags)!
• https://bitbucket.org/lbesson and http://lbesson.bitbucket.org/ (on Bitbucket),
• My GitHub https://github.com/naereen and http://naereen.github.io/ got about 400 visits (since September 2015).