(click to enlarge)I did a quick survey of what people were reading on the site this month, and the results were surprising:

RSS (75% of my readers)

1. 97% of RSS readers dug Cygwin + Putty
2. 27% of RSS readers followed The programmer’s three virtues (the only quote-of-the-week above 1%)
3. 14% of RSS readers hit How much sleep is healthy on Win32?

Direct viewers (25% of all readers)

1. 25% of traffic hit my Markdown cheatsheet (50% referred from Wikipedia)
2. 20% were looking for my Calling Perl from PHP article
3. 10% of visitors read my Tweaking Ubuntu guide
4. 10% of readers wandered through my tongue-in-cheek Top 10 things Linux distros get right that Microsoft doesn’t fluff piece
5. 9% of people hit my 2 week old Flash games for kids page

Top keywords

1. 65% of all searchers were looking for “howto make ice coffee”
2. 25% of searches asked about “tuning ubuntu”

Browser/OS/Screen size

1. 60% Firefox (20% Linux)
2. 25% IE
3. 10% Safari (Mac)
4. And only 2% of readers had a 800×600 or smaller display

The moral of the story

RSS is king, based on my mostly geek readership. Writing fluff for Digg is less useful than writing useful cheat sheets and guides. Links that solve/discuss really annoying technical problems get the most clicks.

I was especially surprised at how few people were interested in Ruby or Rails, and how a page of flash games I made for my kids could get thousands of hits in a matter of weeks.

(All statistics represent unique views, and exclude traffic from my own IPs.)

Swivel is like Flickr, but for data trends (via David Ascher).

Google explores the design of over a billion web documents. Nice to see mountains of data put to uses other than search (and it’s interesting to see what developers are doing).