...virtually, that is. 
Since this
Balik Pulau blog started about
21 months ago on a Saturday afternoon, on the seventh day of the fourth month in common era year of 2007 (19 Raby` al-awal 1428 After Hijrah), humans and robots from
578 cities in 77 countries/territories from all five habitable earth continents (Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia/New Zealand), and perhaps from Antartica too, have visited this "
bppp" (or b3p) domain - a simple blog which was first hosted on blogger.com's blogspot domain, and later shifted to its own dedicated balikpulau.org
domain towards the end of 2008.
Over 80% of the visitors were from the home country Malaysia and the rest came primarily from
United States (~5%) and
Singapore (~4%) while
United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore and Japan contribute about 1% visits each. About 30% of visits from Malaysia came from '
cities' and towns in the home state of
Pulau Pinang, and the rest were primarily from
Kuala Lumpur (23%),
Ipoh, Perak (16%) and
Sungai Petani, Kedah (1.5%).
Traffic TrendsTraffic has been gradually growing, and
practically increasing every month, with an exception during the month of July 2008 or specifically on Sunday of
27 July 2008, when this small town website receives a three-digit unique visits on a single day during which a student (alumni) reunion was held at
MRSM Balik Pulau in conjunction with the school's Silver Jubilee (25-year anniversary) celebration. Another post on the upcoming opening of
first western-food franchise in Balik Pulau was also made on the evening of the same day.
Technical TrendsOur visitors mostly use
Microsoft Internet Explorer as their web browser (at nearly 70%, compared to
Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Google Chrome at 27%, 1.5%, 1% and 0.3% respectively) and it's surprising that there are a few people who still use the archaic
Netscape browser which was dying a slow death since 2004, and finally discontinued by AOL last year on Feb 1, 2008.
Over 95% of our visitors still rely on various flavours of
Microsoft Windows as their computer operating system, while nearly 3% are sticking with or have switched to
Apple Mac OS, and about 0.5% are using
Linux. Other operating systems used by our visitors include
FreeBSD and
SunOS, and mobile OS-es including
SymbianOS and
Apple iPhone & iPod. These numbers however do not represent visits to our
mobile-specific website at
m.balikpulau.org.Our visitors are fast on the superhighways, mostly using high-speed broadband connection with
DSL being the most popular at nearly 60%, and other known types including
T1 (6.23%),
Cable (2.74%) and
OC3 (0.64%). No stats on
mobile broadband (GPRS, 3G/HSDPA etc.), which is estimated at around 10% or more, are available at this time, although wished for in the near future. By the way, at 1% or a lot more, it's surprising that many people still uses
dial-up internet connection at this knowledge economy age. Over 65% of the traffic to this site comes via
Telekom Malaysia (TM) Berhad's network, while other significant networks (at 0.5-3%) include
Maxis Communications Bhd, Jaring Communications Sdn Bhd, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Time Telecommunications Sdn Bhd, Intel Corporation, Avago Technologies, Government Integrated Telecommunication Network (GITN), Starhub, Singnet and
Core IP Development Network.
Well over 80% of our visitors enjoys viewing this site using comfortable screen resolution
of
1024x700 or larger, with the largest practical resolution being
2048x1536 and the smallest resolution being
122x101 (of a mobile phone).
Over 85% of our visitors upgrade their software regularly or using the latest software installed with
Flash version 9.0 or newer and as many as 97% of devices used to access our website currently supports
Java.
Human TrendsAs this blog is primarily filled with posts in
English (without integrated automatic translation as of yet), it's no surprise that our visitors mostly choose English (well over 95%) as their default web browser language, while a handful were observe to have opted for
Chinese, French, Japanese, German and Spanish.Most of our visitors are
one-timers while over 15% have made two or more separate visits, and over 1% who are definitely our most
loyal visitors/readers have returned 25 times or more. Over 20% stays
more than a minute at the site viewing up to two pages (of multiple posts each) per visit, and about 13% stays for three minutes or longer at the site viewing three or more pages per visit.
More than two-third of visitors found us using the two most popular search engines,
Google and
Yahoo at 37% and 33% respectively entering keywords like "
balik pulau" and "
pemandangan indah". Other popular items looked for by our visitors are situated in Balik Pulau such
educational institutions (KKTM, MRSM, KKBP, PBU, ICT/KTP, SMK Seri, Giat MARA etc.),
public amenities (hospital, PLKN training camp, Rapid Penang bus depot, Kompleks Sukan etc.),
housing and lodging (Upen Inn, botanica.ct, Fortune Residences and miscellaneous properties/land/houses/development etc.) and
tourism attractions (laksa, durian, air terjun (waterfalls), Pasir Panjang Beach, taman negara (national park), homestay programme, Pulau Betong etc.).
Other search engines/portals like
Blogger.com, Google Images, MSN/Live and MyBlogLog also contributed some visits in addition to the following sites/blogs that in combination contribute as much as 15% of the traffic to this blog (
Thank you!):-
- rasarasa.net
- ritahyahaya.blogspot.com
- anilnetto.com
- haziamyperspective
Social media like
twitter (microblogging),
facebook (profile portal) and
flicker (image blogging) have also been contributary to some traffic...
Check out the prices: 80-sen kopi-o (black coffee), RM1 goreng pisang... a good afternoon snack for under RM2!
Hard to find: 50-sen red syrup! (except maybe in university/college canteens)
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