sagemath.org relaunch
Harald Schilly
is online. I've started to work on it about two month ago and took
much much longer than i expected. Now I want to recapitulate the first
week and tell you a bit about the page. Especially, because I had to
consider some things on my own and did decisions based on my
experience and some feedback by you. I want to tell you a bit more
about it - my thoughts and the motivation behind.
First, new users. I think, the main target for the website are new
users who got a link from somebody, found it using a search engine or
just stumbled upon it on a software directory/blog/teachers
website/buzz page like digg... Therefore, the best way is a short and
precise information what Sage is about and just enough to make
everybody interested to learn more. Well, this will never be perfect
but I think it works. Most important is to have a short text, because
nobody starts to read 2-3 minutes - this has to happen in <10 secs...
So, what about old users and those who come back? Well, an entrance
page to link to help, download and communication. There is even a link
in the header to quickly notify about the newest version and the
release date. Also, an RSS feed with low-traffic announcements (the
same as the announce mailing list). This should keep everybody updated
who decides to stay in contact with Sage (without being too annoying).
Developers? That's the first not so easy decision. Since I want to
keep it simple, I decided that the whole big "chaotic" sphere of
development related sites should be in the much more dynamic
sage-wiki. This is already the perfect place and in heavy use, and i
think it should be an emphasis on that. So, the development page on
the sage homepage is more a "representation" and "general information"
page, whereas everything in detail happens in the wiki and the trac.
This brings up the second important point: organization and structure!
In the same way as source-code is organized in namespaces and
directories, this should also happen on the website. This is as always
a trade off between an organizational overhead (using directories) and
maintainance. e.g. there is now a main directory for html pages and
all images/pictures are in a subdirectory. Content that does not
belong to the set of main sites, is in a subdirectory: currently
"library" (later more on that idea) and in the future maybe "de" for
geman speaking people.
Old content: There is a lot of outdated content on the previous
webpage. Don't worry, nothing is deleted, I'm going through it and I
move content that seems to be still relevant to the new page, or the
wiki. There also seem to be some deep links into old content that
wasn't even public before. So, since I'm monitoring 404 (page not
found) errors, I know about those links going into nowhere. Therefore,
I've installed some 301 redirects (they magically rewrite the URL to
the new page and tell search engines that this page has moved) and I
am moving them if necessary. But since google (and yahoo) finally
updated most of their database, there are only very few bad links. So,
if there is still a problem, on every page is my email at the bottom,
just tell me.
Monitoring was the keyword in the last paragraph. I'm tracking various
parameters, so that I can optimize the page for users and know how
stuff works in reality. The basics are, that since the page has
launched, about 10,500 visitors looked at the webpage and more than
7,000 of them were never before on the website! The interesting
questions are from where are they? What did they do?
sources:
these websites have somewhere a link to sagemath.org: (the number are
the visits)
macupdate.com (software repository for mac) ~400
stumbleupon.com nearly 300
linux.about.com nearly 250
en.wikipedia.org about 200 (the wikipedia article is a bit weak ...)
macresearch.org 120
and then starts the "long tail": google groups, blogs,
ubuntuforums.org, reddit (only 50), italian wikipedia, french blogs,
japan blogs, etc.
so, most of our friendly websites are directories and public link
pages like digg (but no digg article so far!)
There are also more "obscure" articles about sage in japanese or
russian out there ;)
what's missing, i guess, are universities and "newspapers".
keywords - entered in a search engines and ended up on sagemath.org -
but excluding all search queries mentioning sage (so only the
interesting ones!).
Top hit, with about 70 hits, for "open source mathematica" (or
"mathematica free"). Well, that's easy explained, it fits the mission
statement. More interesting is, that people are actually searching for
it!
Second place, with about 50-100, summing up different versions of the
same statements: "open source math" / "open source math software" /
"free math software" / ...
Then, there are also queries for "open source maple".
In the long tail are unspecific hits, just for things like
"mathematical software" (no "open source") which is quite nice to get
hits anyways.
Statistics on google say, that "math software" ranks sagemath on place
8, but you know, this can change any moment up or down.
No hits are for special mathematical terms, maybe not now but in the
future?, and nothing for "python". Seems like that mentioning python
in a search query has nothing to do with sage. In the end, there is a
lot of python related stuff out there!
Browser war:
Firefox 62% (60% 3.0 / 39% 2.0)
IE 17% ( 68% 7.0 / 32% 6.0)
Safari 11% (I don't know the version numbers, but most of them are 525.*)
Mozilla 4.5% (seamonkey?)
Opera 3.5%
Konqueror 1%
So, as I can see, IE 6 is for me the most troublesome but thank god
not many use it. It was also wise to check everything with Safari!
For the future, I'll still check the site everywhere if the layout
changes and yes, in the meantime I've even checked if it works on
mobile browsers in my cell phone. It renders nearly flawless on my
nokia with opera mini (including the javascript stuff!)
OS war:
Windows 48% (XP 76% / Vista 20%)
Linux 30%
Mac 20% (Intel 76%, PPC 23%)
Conclusion: Many XP Windows users knowing about Firefox and open
source ... once again, no surprise ;)
From where are the users?
Obviously, USA wins hands down...
USA 39%
Germany 9% (we need a /de sub-page)
UK 5%
France 5%
other top countries are canada, italy, spain, japan, netherlands,
mexico, austria, australia, poland, brazil, china, india, sweden (all
others are below 1%)
So, the whole world reaches the page, more or less...
I've looked further into the top cities of USA, no surprises either,
those cities with universities like harvard are among the top ones...
seattle wins, then new york, chicago, portland, ...
I don't know enough about the USA's geography to draw further conclusions.
Finally, the page itself. Two things I want to mention, the top pages
and the search form.
Top pages:
As I expected, the "Tour" page is very important. I have to write more
there soon, since it is the top page after the index page. Even the
download page is beaten by it!
The most important page after viewing "Tour" is "Quickstart". This is
once again an indication of my previous assumption that the page has
to focus on new users.
Overall, the search page is rather seldom used (3% of all visits). I
think that's a good sign - at least I hope so. These terms are the top
searches on the site search:
installation guide, plot, scipy, video, emacs, graph, python, 3d,
blog, changelog, debian, icon, ... and much more like that.
Consequently, I've linked directly to the release notes / changelog
and I'll monitor those top queries.
More interesting words are in the long tail, since they are unique.
So, if there is someone who wants to go through that list ask me. I
think it is some indicator what people want to know...
Well, so much for now, I'll post about the website, trends and some
data, about every two weeks. I think it's very cool that each day more
than 500 users who were never before on sagemath.org visit the page!
Harald
Alec Mihailovs
(when I looked at it - it may be fixed by now). Second - there seem to be no
a link to the screenshot page.
Alec
Martin Albrecht
interesting.
Cheers,
Martin
--
name: Martin Albrecht
_pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
_www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
_jab: martinr...@jabber.ccc.de
David Kohel
Note that all of the mirrors, mine included in Sydney, rynchronize
sage.math.washington.edu, so this site needs to be current. At
present
the line:
Sage Devel Days 1 (aka Sage Days 8.5) will be in Seattle June 13-20,
2008
is out of date (and it lagged behind sagemath.org in announcing
releases).
I would like a faster way to get to the "Download complete source"
link, without
scrolling down the page to find it:
http://www.sagemath.org/download.html
Maybe the text for each platform could be moved to a download page.
Is there any chance of adding some color?
--David
William Stein
>
> Hi Harald,
>
> Note that all of the mirrors, mine included in Sydney, rynchronize
> sage.math.washington.edu, so this site needs to be current. At
> present
> the line:
Harald,
FYI sage.math.washington.edu is a mirror of /home2/sage/www
so you should put in www whatever should go to all the other
mirror sites. First make a complete copy of www though before
deleting stuff.
William
>
> Sage Devel Days 1 (aka Sage Days 8.5) will be in Seattle June 13-20,
> 2008
>
> is out of date (and it lagged behind sagemath.org in announcing
> releases).
>
> I would like a faster way to get to the "Download complete source"
> link, without
> scrolling down the page to find it:
>
> http://www.sagemath.org/download.html
>
> Maybe the text for each platform could be moved to a download page.
>
> Is there any chance of adding some color?
>
> --David
>
> >
>
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
Harald Schilly
> Harald,
>
> FYI sage.math.washington.edu is a mirror of /home2/sage/www
> so you should put in www whatever should go to all the other
> mirror sites. First make a complete copy of www though before
> deleting stuff.
problem: mercurial server is at www/hg. That one has to be
relocated ... sorry for the broken repository when I moved it!
Harald