How Developers Get Their News 13 comments
A few days ago I reconfigured my VPS to redirect (almost) all XML requests to FeedBurner. What a surprise to find out that I have 7,000 subscribers! I guess I’d better blog a little more often.
# Special config/virtual_hosts.conf for lighttpd
# Send nubyonrails feeds requests to FeedBurner
$HTTP["useragent"] !~ "FeedBurner" {
url.redirect = (
"/xml/(rss|rss20|atom|atom10)/feed.xml" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/nubyonrails"
)
}
I love looking at statistics, and maybe you do, too. Here are a few.
RSS and ATOM Readers
In the pie chart above, you can see that the largest percentage of readers view my feed in the Google Reader. Netvibes trails close behind, which surprised me. I thought more developers would use desktop readers, but they don’t. NetNewsWire commands only 6% of subscribers.
A few months ago I wrote a script that used an Apache log parser to read my logfiles and count the number of RSS requests. Bloglines was way out ahead. Either people have switched to Google and Netvibes in the last 6 months, or my script was inaccurate (yes, it did take into account the metadata in feedbot requests that shows how many subscribers a request is being made on behalf of).
Personally, I stopped using an RSS reader of any kind about 6 months ago. I read Planet Ruby on Rails, Ruby Inside and my own PeepCode Network (powered by Peter Cooper’s FeedDigest). I rediscovered Hpricot (and HAML) last weekend and started a redesign of this site that will make it into the Ruby news portal that I want to read but doesn’t exist yet. Give me a few weeks.
Platform
Most people view this site from Windows. Shocking! Maybe the Rails community needs to treat our Windows-using friends a little more nicely?
Browser
Most people are using Firefox. Only 10% on IE, so Rails developers represent the complete opposite ratio of the general public.
Screen Size
Performance
These are the results for one day (instructions).
Before the redirect I was averaging about 80 requests per second. It turns out that most of that was due to very fast action caching for the XML feed (which made up 90% of the requests to this site). I’m still keeping it retro with Typo and it does a pretty good job of caching things when it can. However, the average took a bit of a hit when I dished off 90% of my requests to FeedBurner (the few remaining XML requests are for the comment feeds).
The reality is that the load on my machine is usually under 0.1, even with a few other sites and a Mint installation for PeepCode.
How to Cheat on a Test
Finally, I apologize to all the students who reach this site via the 8th Google result for how to cheat on a test. I hope you learned something about test-driven development, even if by accident!
Nuby on Rails
Geoffrey Grosenbach / Ruby / Code / Graphics / Design / Rails / Merb / Javascript / CSS
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Part of the big gain for Google Reader and the drop for Bloglines is probably due to how Google recently began reporting subscriber numbers.
That change caused a lot of to take notice of Google Reader’s rising popularity.
Theory: Most developers use online feed readers because they have a multi-computer setup for their work: Either a personal laptop and a multi-screen workstation, or a personal computer and a computer they use at a work place.
Addendum theory: All of the computers at a work place are Windows machines.
My Rails-centric Netvibes tab here.
I think Danno’s right—by day I am bound to a company-provided windows machine … my online reader makes my day bearable.
Here are some more interesting stats showing Rails adoption by folks using Winders.
Geoff, part of what I actually love about your blog is that your posts are deeper than most content-wise, always packed with interesting stuff. I like that you tend to not say anything unless you have some good stuff to say.
By all means post more if you like, but don’t feel you have to just because there are so many of us listening!
I read Nuby on Rails at work (Windows) and suspect a large number of people do the same. Doesn’t mean I’d use this machine for anything other than office drone stuff!
Web based readers alow for content to be aggregated without an impact to local machine performance. Plus with Google homepages its easy to csually glance at feeds of interests whille going for a simple search.
However I have been experimenting with Outlook 2007’s RSS client.
Finally, I read this feed indirectly, by subscribing to panetrubyonrails.org’s feed and rubycorner.com’s feed. It makes reading a lot of ruby blogs much easier and allows for new blog discovery without effort.
In case you’ve missed it; there’s a Planet Ruby too.
It’s very interesting to see the screen size stats. I’m surprised that there aren’t more up at the 1600/1920×1200 end but I’m relieved to see there’s no one still on 800×600. Looks like I’ve got to test the aesthetics of my sites down to 768 wide (of course, anything will still work at lower res, you may just get a horizontal scroll bar).
Regarding FeedBurner. It would be great if you enabled FeedBurners email subscriptions feature. I read most of my feeds via email.
@Mika: No problem…I’ve enabled it.
If you like RSS via email, you should check out some of the many services available that can take any RSS feed and send you an email when a new article is posted.
I actually use FeedBlitz for those sites who do not have FeedBurner email enabled. I just like FeedBurner interface most.
It’s very interesting to see the screen size stats.
Cool guys, see ya.
Peter