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Results for tag: analytics

Comparing Quantcast to Alexa

Quantcast versus Alexa

Alexa is often used to identify the most popular websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. However, they don’t provide actual traffic numbers while other websites like QuantCast have these estimates. There are many valid use cases to leverage these rankings but I would guess that beyond the first 10k to 50k results, it gets quite inaccurate. Both services collect this data differently and they both provide a top 1 million list so today I decided to compare these two data sets against each other and figure out their differences in website ranking.
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Histogram Generator with D3

Histogram Generator

Histograms are really powerful means of visualizing the distribution of data. I have previously created a histogram generator with jQplot, and today I wanted to do something similar with D3.js. My motivation for this came from finding D3 histogram functions and I wanted to see how they work. I also wanted to allow the user to specify the size of the graph, the data, labels for x and y axis, and the amount of bins.
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Internet and Website Trends with HTTParchive

website trends

In my last web performance tools article I have mentioned Ilya Grigorik’s Bigqueries forum where people can share and discuss interesting queries on the HTTParchive. These queries can give us some insight into internet trends and the state of the web. Today, I wanted to share two of my favorite queries from that forum and follow up with some of my own queries to identify some interesting website trends. I have decided to execute my queries in MySQL with the latest imported HTTParchive dump. This is mostly because I am constantly running into limits with using the HTTPArchive database on Google BigQuery.
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Most Popular Image Sources on Pinterest

popular picture sources on pinterest

Have you ever wondered where do most of the photos on Pinterest come from? What are the most popular Pinterest photo sources? While Tumblr, Flickr, and Etsy make sense, I was surprised to see recipes websites make the top 10 (but I guess that is due to my lack of interest in food recipes – it also explains their acquisition of PunchFork).

Zoomsphere collects a lot of interesting data on social sites and below you will see the top 12 most popular websites (image sources) on Pinterest:
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Histogram Generator with jqPlot

HTML5 Histogram

Histograms are a great way of visualizing the distribution of data. I use them a lot at work but today I was searching for a histogram generator and did not come up quickly with meaningful results. I did find histogram generators like this but I needed something better. I am pretty familiar with jqPlot so I decided to write my own histogram generator, something a little better than this jsfiddle histogram example.
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