Second Negative

The browser wars

During the recent re-launch of Second Negative, I moved from tracking site stats through Extreme Tracking to installing Shaun Inman’s excellent ShortStat on my own server.

The traffic has been good these past few days, largely due to a link posted in the WP forums by Root. An interesting detail about the “new” stats is the browser breakdown. While the old site registered that about 70% of all visitors were using some form of Internet Vagrant Explorer, visitors to the WP version are using Firefox at 48%, versus Explorer at 21%. That’s a pretty amazing shift. The odds are after the forum referrals die down, I’ll go back to my usual IE audience. It might happen even sooner once I get my content back up, and you guys figure out that you either hate me, or you just don’t give a damn.

To continue rambling about stats, I also experimented with Re_Invigorate for a while, and read the documentation on BBClone. They each have very nice features. I particularly like that BBClone shows a list of visitors by hostname (ip). That would be a nice feature in ShortStat. I edited a bit of code, and managed to get it working, but it also generated a nice list of errors. I’ll probably get around to playing with it again eventually. Well, that or I’ll get around to finding somebody who has already done it better.

Off topic, I’m still in the process of tweaking the site. I can’t seem to stop messing with the meta font (line below the post title). I implemented Gravatars in the comments section. I should get all the old posts imported this weekend, but I tend to lie, so it could be a week.

Let’s end by saying a small prayer for the U.S. Men’s Basketball team. “To Whom It May Concern, please help the U.S. team remember that shooting the ball is not a crime. Thanks. Amen.”