Recently I looked at the stats of my web site. DreamHost provides Analog 6.0. I supplemented it with awstats. Plus there are some other means to analyze the traffic. Let’s put it this way: I know my average reader. I thought I did. Anyway I found a few surprises.

The country list includes 77 countries. Out of 193. Not bad for a personal blog. Practically all Eurasian countries, and countries of both Americas are in the list. Australia, New Zealand, and many island countries are there as well. Only 2 countries from Africa: South Africa and Senegal. Pity.

Many people come to my site to read more about Django. Let’s do the math, shall we? At present moment Django has 15 locales. 7 more languages are registered in Django’s list. People from 77 countries were interested in Django. Do you see the discrepancy here?

I understand that some people are satisfied without additional translations. Canadians, British, Australians, New Zealanders can read U.S. English, Austrians, Liechtensteiners, Luxembourgers, and Swiss understand the German without problems, and so on.

But why don’t I see Japanese language in the list? I refuse to believe that the major developed country doesn’t have a single dedicated guy to do this simple job. It cannot be! Where is Korean language? 50 million people in South Korea and nobody wants to translate for compatriots? Impossible! And don’t get me started on ex-Soviet states. Probably they understand Russian, but come on, show your pride! So far only Latvian is registered.

Another big enigma is lack of Persian and Arabic languages. 70 million Persian-speaking people, 200 million Arabic-speaking people, and 0 of them are brave enough to translate Django’s Admin. I know you are out there, I’ve seen you on my web site! I am disappointed.

The weirdest search phrase, which routes people to my blog, is … (drumroll) … "rails lost connection to mysql server during query". 2 month ago I mentioned that Django’s MySQL backend was losing connection to MySQL server. At that time I’ve noticed that Ruby on Rails had similar problem. I investigated the problem, it was solved the very next day, and the patch was submitted for Django. But now every day I have visitors looking for "rails lost connection to mysql server during query" or some variation of this phrase. Every single day somebody is googling for it. I checked RoR’s ticket — it’s still open for the last 10 months marked as "blocker", and with the "highest" priority. I wish I knew Ruby better.

And last but not least surprise. Almost a month ago I posted screenshots of OpenWrt GUI on Flickr. This is the project am working on in my rare free time. The most viewed picture of the set was viewed about 400 times. Two weeks ago I released a preview version and recorded a screencast. The archive was downloaded ~200 times. The screencast was viewed about 900 times. Huh? Apparently people love to watch screencasts. I can understand that they can’t download the software (lazy, scared of viruses and trojans, don’t have proper hardware, and so on). I don’t understand the desire to see a slideshow instead of raw pictures. It puts me in the minority: I rarely tempted to watch screencasts. I prefer to see thumbnails of screenshots checking out the most interesting for me. I feel it is more time efficient. I guess I was outvoted by my readership.

Update (after 1 day): Yep, somebody was looking for "rails lost connection to mysql server during query" again today. Yep, almost everybody who read my rant about unexplainable lore of screencasts immediately proceeded to watch my screencast again. Some things never change.