3 Million Views

3 Million Views
Aug 22, 2014

I reached 3 million views on my wiki pages this week. Not a huge accomplishment, but in some ways a validation that wikis provide a convenient and effective way of storing information. I always recommend wikis to people in need of a system for cataloguing various documents that can easily be uploaded, created, edited, and deleted when needed.

I use my main wiki system (mediawiki's excellent wiki package) for class material, research, and to document various computer-related recipes or solutions I come up with from time to time, and that I know I will need in the future. I have all my syllabi, course material, homework, solutions, exams dating back to 2005 on line. Pdfs of most of my research papers. Tutorials I create mostly for myself on about every new language or computer system I teach myself. These tutorials, actually, contribute to the most of the 3,000,000 views I logged. Google Analytics is a nice tool to figure out how a set of Web pages is accessed. 85% of accesses to my pages are from Web searches, 10% from referrals from other pages (possibly mine). The most popular pages are for my Arduino-XBee tutorial, indicating a strong interest in micro-controllers out there, and for my cloud-computing pages on the use of Hadoop. More details on the statistics can be found here.

Note that not all of my pages are public, as I protect some of them (for example homework solutions) and restrict them to either myself only, or to computers with a given IP address (only Smith college campus, for example).

In short, wikis are good!