amiga-news.de - amiga-news.de: A half-year review

30.Dec.2024

amiga-news.de: A half-year review
Every website lives from the interest of its users. We therefore wanted to know which news trigger particular interest and what the general situation is regarding visits to one of the best-known German-language sites about the Amiga. In the following, our server administrator Markus Bonet looks back on the past six months and explains his approach to the analysis.

There are countless tools and frameworks for professionally analyzing the use of a website. With a proper database to evaluate the data historically if necessary. This allows one to build great dashboards and put all kinds of information that a typical web server reveals into perspective. As we didn't want to take a sledgehammer to crack a nut here, we opted for a simplified approach. The following requirements were decisive:

How often are specific news items retrieved?
Are they retrieved by real users or by one of the many bots?
What does a ranking of the news items look like in a continuous 14-day time frame?
What are the most clicked news items in a year and how often were they accessed?
There doesn't have to be a special way of analyzing the data retrospectively. A simple overview is sufficient for orientation.

In order to determine this by simple means, we have modified the configuration of the Apache web server slightly so that calls to the start page and specific messages are saved separately in a special log file. A distinction is made in advance as to whether the call is made by a known bot. Of course, the source addresses also play a role, as not every automated call is carried out fairly with a correct user agent. This enabled us to integrate a tool that is useful for us, which continuously records the "top news" on the page and reports the hits.

Of course, there is a methodological limitation in that the main page can be configured by the reader, but we can only evaluate the clicked news items. However, we believe that only a minority still use the original look of the main page with complete news items, while most readers are likely to view the titles only according to the current default setting, and that the ranking of the news items is nevertheless representative, even if the absolute figures would be higher.

For yesterday (29.12.2024), for example, the statistics looked like this (always referring to the corresponding German news-items):

( 12.3 days old)    AROS archives uploads until 14.12.2024
(  8.8 days old)    Programming course: A500 programming - Finishing the Shooting Gallery Project
(  7.3 days old)    Operating system-compliant Pac-Man implementation: 8th/9th part of the video series
(  8.4 days old)    Sensible World of Soccer: Teams of the 24/25 season
(  8.8 days old)    Print magazine: Amiga Future, issue 172 - preview and excerpts
(  7.1 days old)    Dogfights in Asteroids style: Hyper Wings 1.666
( 15.9 days old)    Developer documentation: Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual - AmigaDOS
( 12.3 days old)    MorphOS-Storage uploads until 14.12.2024
( 15.9 days old)    Mark Sibly (Blitz Basic) deceased
( 12.3 days old)    Christmas game: Santas Present Drop 4
(  6.3 days old)    Assembler: ASM-Pro 1.21 released
(  8.4 days old)    Image collection: Update of the Amiga Graphics Archive
( 14.5 days old)    MOD-Player: rePlayer V0.16.8 for Windows
( 15.9 days old)    AROS distribution: AROS One 2.7 (x86)
( 12.3 days old)    OS4Depot uploads until 14.12.2024
(  8.4 days old)    WHDLoad: New installers until 21.12.2024
( 11.1 days old)    Scene World Podcast episode #204 - ScummVM with Eugene Sandulenko
( 13.3 days old)    Demoparty: MountainBytes 2025 (Switzerland, 14.-16.02.)
( 13.3 days old)    Arcade-Game: Santatron 2024
( 12.3 days old)    Boing Attitude interview with Oliver Roberts now in English
(132.3 days old)    Retro Games: New Amiga "console" to be released in Q1 2025
( 15.0 days old)    Epsilon's World: Amiga games from 2024
( 15.0 days old)    Appreciation: Sam460 - The PCIe pioneer (Czech)
(  8.4 days old)    Video: Preview of Worms DC 1.5 levels by Eric W. Schwartz
(  1.8 days old)    SSL library: wolfSSL for Amiga HotHotHot!
(  7.1 days old)    Amiga emulator for Mac OS: vAmiga 3.0b3
( 12.3 days old)    WHDLoad: New installers until 14.12.2024
( 14.5 days old)    Audio player: UADE plugin 0.12.3 for Audacious (Windows, Linux, Mac OS)
(  5.2 days old)    AROS: Bounty projects for EFI customization in planning
(  7.0 days old)    Train simulator: Trans-Pennine Express
(  8.4 days old)    Aminet uploads until 21.12.2024
(  7.0 days old)    Action game: Amiga Yoomp!
( 10.9 days old)    Sokoban variant: Ami Robbo 2, physical edition
( 13.9 days old)    Shooting game new edition: Extreme Violence 2 V0.10
(  1.4 days old)    Team 17: Martyn Brown deceased HotHotHot!
(  3.8 days old)    Video: Doom clone Grind 0.5 HotHotHot!
( 13.3 days old)    Game: Update for Star Dust Wars - Director's Cut
(  8.4 days old)    Chat software: AmigaGPT 2.0.2 with MorphOS version
(  3.9 days old)    Emulated Amiga: Field report on the A600GS HotHotHot!
(  8.7 days old)    Event: Amiga 40 on October 18/19 2025
( 11.0 days old)    Print magazine: ASM (Aktueller Software Markt), issue 12/24 (German)
(  2.5 days old)    Operating system for the Amiga: Third alpha version of Serena OS HotHotHot!
( 11.1 days old)    Universal PCI driver system: OpenPCI 11.2
(  3.8 days old)    Amiga emulator: Amiberry 7.0.0-RC2 HotHotHot!
( 12.3 days old)    Aminet uploads until 14.12.2024
(  6.2 days old)    Merry christmas!
(  5.2 days old)    Workbench distribution: AmiKit 11 now freely available HotHotHot!
( 13.3 days old)    Case study: Using the Scorpion engine for porting Ghosts'n'Goblins to the Amiga
( 10.5 days old)    Trevor's Blog: Another one bites the Dust!
( 12.3 days old)    AmigaKit: Apparently modified A1200 mainboard planned HotHotHot!

Increasing from top to bottom, you can see the articles that have been clicked on most frequently in the last 14 days. The label "HotHotHot!" marks those messages that had a particularly high number of clicks on a single day - as of yesterday, the front-runner was the one about the A1200GS from AmigaKit, the planned counterpart to the Organge Pi-based Amiga replacement A600GS, in which the AmiBerry emulator ensures the compatibility of the ARM-based mini-computer.

After a few days, interest wanes noticeably, so that a longer time window than the 14 days mentioned is not relevant for us. The example of the aforementioned news item shows that half of all hits occurred in the first two days:

Dec. 18   29 %
Dec. 19   23 %
Dec. 20   11 %
Dec. 21   12 %
Dec. 22    8 %
Dec. 23    7 %
Dec. 24    3 %
Dec. 25    2 %
Dec. 26    1 %
Dec. 27    1 %
Dec. 28    1 %
Dec. 29    1 %
Total:   100 %

We can call up the evaluation live at any time, but snapshots of the evaluation are also created daily. From 18 to 19 December, for example, we were able to clearly see that the aforementioned news item triggered particular interest.

What else have we learned about visits to our website?

By far the most visits are made by bots. The following figures were obtained based on visits over the last 14 days (main page and news pages only, no comments/forum etc.):

85.18 %  bots
14.82 %  users

28.71 %  of users accessed the homepage
 2.18 %  of users used an Amiga browser

The proportion of calls that we identify as users always fluctuates between 10 and 15 percent. It is also interesting to note that the number of hits by Amiga browsers is between 2 and 2.5 percent. The clear leader here is IBrowse on a - real or emulated - 68k processor. This user agent often makes it into the top 20 of those user agents that we assign to users:

IBrowse/3.8 (Amiga; Amiga0S 3.2; Build 38.8 68K)
Mozilla/5.8 (Macintosh; PowerPC AmigaOS 4.2; Odyssey Web Browser; rv:1.23 r5) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) OWB/1.23 r5 Safari/538.1
Mozilla/5.8 (Macintosh; PowerPC MorphOS 3.18; Odyssey Web Browser; rv:1.26) AppleWebKit/538.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) OWB/1.26 Safari/538.18
IBrowse/3.8 (Amiga; AmigaOS 3.9; Build 38.8 68K)
OWB/3.32 (Amiga0S 4.1)

Of course, this can only serve as a rough guide. We know that detection via user agents is not always reliable. Incidentally, conspicuous IP addresses that do not originate from the providers' CGNAT pools also trigger detection as bot calls. We are currently concerned about the frequent calls by the user agent "NextCloud-News/1.0". Since we see actual users behind it, we leave its calls with the users, even if it is pushing their numbers strongly. Perhaps the NextCloud users would like to reveal themselves in the comments. ;-)

By the way, amiga-news.de is not only frequently visited in German-speaking countries. The English news items do reach an average of 25 to 40 percent of the volume of their German counterparts.

Since we only implemented our analysis in the course of the year, let's take at last a look at the figures for the second half of 2024: Which news items were our top performers that attracted particular attention? The figure in brackets indicates the overall ranking.

July:

Game data base LemonAmiga has been hacked (13)

August:

Operating system for the Amiga: Second alpha version of Serena OS (1)

September:

Video: Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold (10)

October:

November:

December:

AmigaKit: Apparently modified A1200 mainboard planned (2)

(snx)

[News message: 30. Dec. 2024, 19:01] [Comments: 0]
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