Happy first birthday, hathix.com! The year in review

Cute elephant in box with birthday cake and hat
Blow out those candles, cause hathix.com is turning 1 year old!

Can you believe it? hathix.com is turning 1 year old- yup, it was registered exactly a year ago today… ah, fond memories! In just a year, hathix.com has gone from just a thought in my head to a full-fledged (and hopefully good) website.

You know, it’s hard for me to imagine life before I had hathix – but that was just a year ago. My parents say they felt the same; it’s hard for them to imagine life before kids. Anyway.

I’m throwing hathix.com a birthday party today, complete with my hathix.com t-shirt and a little cake (check out a photo of the celebration at the bottom of the post.) And, of course, a blog post. Now’s a good time to look back on what I’ve been up to this long last year.

 

So what have I been up to this last year? A lot:

Take a look at the visitor numbers courtesy of Piwik, the greatest analytics software in the world:

The monthly hathix.com visitor stats
hathix.com has had 5525 visitors in just a year! (Estimates for February, when it's completed, are over 1000!)
  • 5525 visitors from 87 countries
  • 13,445 page views
  • 174 hours and 56 minutes – or 7.3 days – spent by visitors
  • 1694 referrals from 145 websites using 741 URLs
  • 2026 referrals from 17 search engines with 1151 keywords

Even more numbers:

Map of all visitors to hathix.com
Most visitors to hathix.com came from the US.
  • Most common search engine keywords: swiss cheese, fall, cute cartoon animals, hathix, firefox release strategy
  • Most popular referring sites: google.com, sourceforge.net, fileforum.betanews.com, aussieeducator.org.au, facebook.com
  • Most popular search engines: Google (59%), Google Images (33%), Ask (2%), Bing (1%), Yahoo (1%)
  • Most popular browsers: Internet Explorer 8 (14%), Chrome 16 (7%), Firefox 3.6 (7%), Internet Explorer 9 (6%), Chrome 15 (5%)
  • Most popular browser families: Chrome (37%), Firefox (33%), Internet Explorer (27%), Opera (3%)
  • Most popular operating systems: Windows 7 (42%), Windows XP (32%), Mac OS (10%), Windows Vista (8%), Linux (5%)
  • Most common countries: USA (51%), Spain (5%), UK (4%), Vietnam (3%), Mexico (3%)

Blog

hathix.com’s blog (what you’re reading right now) debuted in March 2011 (check out the first ever post), so its birthday isn’t quite here yet. This blog has come a long way; a good portion (can’t say how many for sure, but I’m guessing upwards of 50%) of all the visits to hathix have come from the blog. Munch on these stats:

visitor stats for blog.hathix.com
Traffic to the hathix.com blog has been increasing pretty steadily! :)

The blog’s even been featured in the Times Herald newspaper!

Cabra

 

Cabra, the surprisingly useful flashcard program
Cabra, a free flashcard program, has been downloaded over 8,000 times!

Last January I started work on a simple flashcard program. No bells and whistles or anything; it just let you make and study flashcards, although not very well.

I released Cabra, my little contraption, to the world on February 14, 2011, and almost exactly a year later it’s come a long, long way.

Cabra’s on version 0.6.2 (it’s 20th release!) and it now uses powerful algorithms coupled with an advanced but easy-to-use interface. I’ve learned a lot from programming it (I’ve been forced to, actually :D) and it’s been pretty successful; thousands of people use it an (hopefully) improve their studying.

I can’t measure all the stats – many websites such as softpedia.com, cnet’s download.com, and countless others let people download Cabra from their site so I have no idea how many people download from there, but I can get a rough estimate. The main place where Cabra can be downloaded, SourceForge, has an awesome download tracker.

Take a look at all the stats for this year from SourceForge:

Screenshot of Cabra, a free flashcard program
A screenshot of the latest version of Cabra
  • 5625 downloads
  • Downloaded in 125 countries – even Namibia, Azerbaijan, and Paraguay!
  • Countries where most downloads come from: Spain (15%), USA (13%), Mexico (10%), India (6%), Chile (5%), Romania (3%)
  • Operating systems: Windows (51%), “Unknown” (46% – no idea what “unknown” means), Linux (2%), Mac (1%)

There’s too many other download sites to count, but I’ve counted roughly 2000 from Softpedia and 500 from Download.com – which puts Cabra at around 8,000, maybe more. Not too shabby.

Interestingly, the Spanish-speaking parts of the world seem to love Cabra (most of my downloads come from Spanish-speaking countries, and Cabra is featured on several Spanish download sites.) I’m guessing this is because Cabra is actually Spanish for “goat.” Yeah, I’m REALLY creative.

Read more about Cabra here.

The Rest

I’ve also been working on some lower-profile projects (as of yet):

  • Talitrum, an Android and web game that’s been downloaded over 500 times. It’s still a work in progress.
  • Sprinkle Safari, a pretty fun (I like to think) adventure/RPG web game
    Sprinkle Safari, a web-based adventure game
    A screenshot of Sprinkle Safari. Try it out: is.gd/sprinkle

    that’s available for download on the Chrome App Store. It’s only got 26 downloads in a week or so of existence.

  • hathix cartoon animals, a remarkably cute set of 43 cartoon animals that are freely available for download. No download stats on this :(

The Future

So… next year. Wow. I’ve come a pretty decent way this last year; I hope I can go even farther this next year. Some tentative goals:

  • 100+ pageviews a day
  • 5 blog posts a month
  • Making some fun new blog posts not related to technology
  • Cabra downloaded 20,000 times
  • Talitrum downloaded 5,000 times
  • Sprinkle Safari downloaded 1,000 times
  • Make some more Android apps (thinking of porting Cabra to Android)
  • Make some more web games
  • Learning more. Always learning more.

Thanks for reading this far! Hope you’ve enjoyed this year (I know I have); let’s hope next year can be even better!

See you, and thanks for the great year :) As promised, here’s that photo of the celebration.

hathix's first birthday party, complete with cake and flowers
The official hathix mascot celebrates in style. Click to view full size.

 

Published by

Neel Mehta

Harvard College. Web developer. Sometime philosopher. Baseball junkie.

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