Balik Pulau welcomes visitors from 578 cities...

...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 Trends

Traffic 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 Trends

Our 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 Trends

As 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!):-

1. rasarasa.net
2. ritahyahaya.blogspot.com
3. anilnetto.com
4. haziamyperspective

Social media like twitter (microblogging), facebook (profile portal) and flicker (image blogging) have also been contributary to some traffic...