the mcmuffins go international

Mrs McMuffin is a bit dubious about sharing the wonderful information that I have gathered from StatCounter because she doesn't like the idea that we might seem as if we've been bitten by the stats bug that seems to afflict so many other bloggers. I don't care. I just love the fact that I have so much information about the people who visit our site. I might even put them up as a permanent page on the site. Anyway, these stats were collected during the week of 27.11.04 - 03.12.04. Click on the thumbnail for the bigger picture.

The McMuffins loveliness truly is international. We have been visited by people living in 57 different countries across all the continents. (I know it's a bit sad but the picture is made up of the flags from those countries.) That's a third of all the countries in the world. Most of all, the Americans love us. We have been visited by people living in 48 states. I just don't know why Nevada and Wyoming hate us, but maybe they will come around to our way of thinking at some later date. There is a chance that we have been visited them already but for some reason AOL users don't always show up in the stats. It has something to do with the way they process cookies.

The other stats are just as fascinating. I have absolutely no idea what they mean because I have nothing to compare them with. I don't know what a healthy number of hits look like. I do know that during last week we got around 3000 hits, of which around 2000 were unique. Unsurprisngly most of the people who visited us were using machines running some variation of Windows. However, I was surprised to see that 11% of our visitors were using Macs, which is about five times higher than Apple's market share would have lead me to believe. I can only guess that people who are interested in blogs and the internet are just a little bit more geeky, or stylish, than usual, and so are more likely to use a Mac. As you can see about two thirds of our visitors were using some version of Internet Explorer with Firefox and Safari users accounting for the majority of the last third. I was amazed at the way in which Firefox seems to have taken off, and I imagine again reflects the slightly more demanding needs of the regular internet user.

Finally, there are huge variations amongst the screen resolution that people are using, which makes designing any site very difficult that's for sure. There is even a few people still using 640x480. Looking at most sites must be hard work for them.

That completes our tour around the lovely people that inhabit the kingdom of McMuffinland here in cyberspace (I just love that word) Any comments would be welcome. And, at the risk of sounding like the stats whore that I have become, any comparisons would be welcome too, but not if they're going to make me feel bad. I don't want to hear about the blogging superstars who get 500,000 hits a week. I already know that's good.