Download statistics. Part 2.

Anar here...

Download statistics. Part 1.

I got some free time on the holidays and slightly updated the download statistics page of PoD, in order to make it a bit more convenient.

A little bit of effort can make a beautiful combination of a docbook Website technology and Google Visualization API. I learned how to introduce custom docbook elements to docbook Website schemas and this helped to properly marry it with Google charts.

Stats are updated automatically and, thanks to docbook technology, the page is generated automatically as well. All is going via a Git repository. The whole process, including publishing of the site, is completely automated.

I am so much in love with DOCBOOK!!!

Now, concerning the stats. Since June, 2010, PoD was downloaded 179 times from 13 countries.

56% of downloads are made from different locations in Germany. Not a surprise, since PoD was started in terms of the D-Grid project and was developed in Germany and the first stable version was used in GSI (Germany), where, for the first time in the world ;), a production "static" PROOF cluster was staged out in favor of PROOF via PoD.

I will be not tired to repeat, that these are very good results for such a specific product like PoD is.

Check the stats page out yourself ;)

Here you have some screenshots:

Downloads by Country

Anar here ... with a bit of propaganda right now... :)

I am very glad to see that PoD is being used or at least evaluated in many countries already!

The statistics below shows the downloads of PoD source tarball for the last 6 months. It is only 166 downloads by about 12 countries. 

"It's a very small number" - would you say.  But don't forget, that for such a young and specific product like PoD, which works on a very specific field - it is a great success. Every new user is a success, I think.

Since PoD supports a shared installation feature now, I expect the download counts to dramatically reduce. Due to the fact, that in most cases PoD is and will be downloaded only once for a site and shared between several users on that site.

BTW, I also expect more customers from the USA to join, as soon as a Condor plug-in for PoD is released. The plug-in now in development and expected in an early beta in several days.

Anyway the downloads count doesn't really matter to us. It is just interesting to see how our product slowly gets maturer.

What is really important to us is to create a product, which will help, simplify and populate a PROOF-like-analysis.

Download statistics

Anar here...

It has been a long time since my last post ;) You know, I was busy with PoD development and stuff.

There are many new features implemented in PoD and I am doing my best to get them all tested and available in the next release of PoD, which I am planning to make in a week or so. In my next posts on this blog I am going to highlight some features. So, please, subscribe for updates or follow me on this blog (on the right you see the followers bar)...

Anyhow this post is not exactly about PoD, but about a PoD web site update. There are some cosmetic changes, and among others I have implemented an automatic publishing of PoD download statistics. It is time, I think, to start to get some statistics (it's better to be early than late). You can check it out here.

So far we have around 130 Downloads since summer 2010. I think it is very good number, since PoD is a specific product for a specific field. 

As you may know or have noticed, pod.gsi.de is a docbook based website. Since long time I am in love with docbook (PoD User's manual http://pod.gsi.de/documentation.html is made in docbook) and even the web site of PoD is also a docbook based. I am using docbook Website schemas and very happy with it. For a docbook Website concept I will dedicate a separate post some time later.

Back to the subject. The stats are generated automatically every night. Since I don't have a direct access to our Web Server and its logs, it was quite tricky to implement.

The whole process is completely automated.

I am getting the log via a script. The stats are parsed by a simple C++ program, which outputs a docbook page. The page is than committed to PoDWebsite Git repo. As soon as the Git repo updated with a new commit, buildbot will automatically start a build of PoDWebsite and if parsing and conversion to html are ok, the site will be published. WoW :) So, simple is that. I love automations!

PoD Download Statistics