Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami

As with the unrest in North Africa, the effects of yesterday's disaster in Japan are felt even on Plone.org.  Here's the distribution of visits to Plone.org from last year, 11 March 2010.

And here's the map of site visitors from 11 March 2011...

In the northeast of the country site visits disappeared (understandably) with only one on the west coast.  Site visits picked up significantly in the south and west. Perhaps people are using Plone to develop sites that can quickly aid in the humanitarian relief effort?  Google's People Finder is now available in Japanese and Ushahidi has an active site.  If you have an idea for making use of Plone at this time, don't be shy. 

Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the victims of this disaster. 

The Great Backyard Plone Count -- 2011

So the Great Backyard Plone Count for 2011 is officially off and running.  Things didn't exactly start out as smoothly as I'd hoped -- got a call from the nurse at my parents' assisted living facility around 7:00 this evening.  Turns out Mom had a 3-alarm gusher of a nosebleed that couldn't be controlled.  While she got an ambulance ride to Presbyterian, I drove over to the hospital.  To make a long story short, everyone was incredibly helpful and after some cauterization and a very strange inflatable gauze packing up the schnoz, we actually got Mom tucked back into her own bed by midnight.

Of course, that means I didn't get out copies of last year's "sightings" to their owners in time to verify that the sites are still active.  It also means that I'm only now turning on the data entry form.

Even with that hiccup right at the start, if you'd like to participate, especially in getting credit for hidden or obscure Plone sites, this is your chance.  Use the form below to enter information about Plone sites you are aware of, especially intranet sites that are behind firewalls. In those cases a URL is not necessary, but a site name and description would be particularly helpful. Names and personal information (e-mail, etc.) are only for internal statistical and QA use and will not be used beyond this study.  The live form can also be found at:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=0AjB6ixF2SsaScHktWlJpYnBXTVpWRnJzMWhoaEU4WWc&hl=en#gid=0

The form will be open for data entry until midnight Monday the 21st.  Thanks in advance. If you'd like a look at last year's data, check out the Google Docs summary sheet.



As an aside, get your binoculars out and spend 15 minutes (or more) counting the birds in your own backyard.  Then submit your observations to become part of an enormous citizen-scientist ornithological study.

The Great Backyard Plone Count

It's that time of the year -- time for both the Great Backyard Bird Count (Plone-driven, btw) and the Great Backyard Plone Count.  While the bird count is a collaborative bird-watching effort by the Audubon Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Bird Studies Canada, the Plone count is a voluntary effort to collect data on the world-wide distribution of Plone-powered sites.  In homage to the GBBC, the Plone count is held the same weekend, which this year is Friday 18 through Monday 21 February. 

Because many Plone sites are intranets behind firewalls, they can't be located by crawling the web.  This is a chance for developers, site owners, and users to stand up and be counted.  It's a non-scientific, totally voluntary effort for self-reporting Plone-based web portals. 

I'll be distributing portions of last year's list to respective contributors for confirmation of existing sites on Thursday.  Then on Friday, the input form to the Google Docs spreadsheet will be opened up.  Anyone can then submit sightings of Plone in the wild. 

Although there's significant bias in a survey like this, the most value comes from tracking trends over time.  This is the third annual Backyard Plone Count and as the number of yearly data points increase, we'll better be able to extrapolate from the observations. 

More to come this Friday.  As they say at the sushi bar, stay tuna'd...

The Security Announcement and Mobile

An interesting spike turned up in the Plone.org visitor stats this past week.  Although the regular visitors showed just a tiny blip, mobile usage more than doubled. 

Seems that the recent security announcement got people's attention and they turned to Plone.org with their smart phones.  Based on this, it would seem prudent to design mobile style sheets to pay particular attention to time-sensitive announcements.  That's probably good advice for any website.

One other observation from the above figure:  mobile visitors to Plone.org don't show the usual weekly pattern of general visitors.  Minima are as likely to occur on a Tuesday as a Sunday for mobile.  Meanwhile, general visitors show a strong dropoff on the weekends.  This trend for mobile might just be random fluctuations due to the smaller number of mobile visitors, something that gets swamped by the huge number of non-mobile site users.

If you use Plone.org via a mobile device, I'd like to hear from you -- how and when do you turn to the website with your phone?  Please comment.

Plone in Egypt Addendum

The Internet finally came back up in Egypt today and, as part of the initial flush of activity, there were visitors to Plone.org.  Welcome back, Egypt. 

Plone in Egypt

It might seem trivial in light of the chaotic events going on right now in Egypt, but even Plone usage statistics reflect the Egyptian national blackout on Internet services. 

Location of visitors to Plone.org -- past 90 days

As is apparent from the map, Egypt sends visitors to Plone.org from Alexandria to Luxor with most of the activity centered, understandably, in Cairo.

Egyptian visits to Plone.org, 2009-10 vs 2010-11

From the number of Egyptian visits in the above graph, it can be seen that things were largely the same as this period last year until this week when the bottom fell out.  Current daily visits are zero.  Admittedly, Egyptians have more immediate things to worry about than theming their Plone sites.

Also, Plone.net lists a USAID ICT Portal in Egypt.  The URL returns a "server not found" error.  Not a surprise there, either. 

Over the past month there have been significant dips in Plone.org traffic from Tunisia as well.  Site visitors hit zero on five days, which has never happened for even a single day since last Ramadan (11 August).

I was pleased to see that the Telecomix News Agency (@Telecomix) has been promoting Internet access via "the old way," dial-up modem.   If anyone has any bright ideas on how to help out via Plone, now's the time speak up.  Maybe EC2 portals could be useful? 

Meanwhile, PloneMetrics' thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in the region during these troubled times.

PloneMetrics Person of the Year

It's that time of year again when I peruse the events of the past year and unilaterally designate some lucky person "Plone Metrics Person of the Year."  This award comes with only the promise that if the winner and I are in the same town at the same time, I'll buy them a beer. 

Past winners have been:

2009	Nate Aune
2008	Joel Burton
2007	Alexander Limi

The competition has been particular stiff, with outstanding contributions from a wide number of Plonistas worldwide.  It's been a eventful year for Plone and that makes 2010's throwdown especially difficult.  Noteworthy contributions during 2010 that deserve a shout-out include, but are not limited to:

• The 2010 Plone Conference people at Netsight, who did a great job with this year's event. Matt Hamilton's (general and host-specific) and Astra Fowden's summaries are worth their weight in gold. 
• The release managers for Plone 4 (Eric Steele) and 5 (Hanno Schlichting) are also high on my list.  Of course, their job wouldn't be possible without the core developers and all the Plone contributors.  Hats off to them all. 
• As always, the Foundation Board gets a great big nod of appreciation here.  Gier Baekholt (2009-10) and Calvin Hendryx-Parker (2010-11) deserve special mention for shepherding the Plone community.
• There is also some local Albuquerque talent among this year's nominees:  Michael Bernstein (Code for America fellow) and Emily Lewis (Webuquerque sparkplug).
• The Plone IRC Superstar Contest winner and runners up always deserve special praise.  The final determination has still not been announced as we go to press, but this is a reminder that the IRC community is a key part of the Plone ecosystem.   
• In a similar vein, here's a thanks to all those blogging and microblogging about Plone.  I'm particularly pleased to see diversity highlighted with a successful year of PloneChix. 
• Finally, Roberto Allende gets a big tip o' the hat as the champion of World Plone Day.  This year André Nogueira takes over the reins as we look forward to WPD 27 April.  

All that said, with this being a metrics-centric blog, I thought I'd run a few numbers and see what falls out.

As I mentioned Matt and Netsight are serious contenders.  Here's chart of World Plone Conference attendance since 2006.

Bristol turned out to be right in the middle of the range and probably would have done better had the world economy been brighter.  I regret missing the conference (yup, tight budget), but the high quality videos of the presentations has been a terrific resource that has softened the blow.  They have placed the bar high for future conferences. 

Another notable nominee for today's award is Eric Steele.  Here's the graphic that shows the impact of the Plone 4 release.  

Not only was there a huge spike in Plone.org visitors associated with the release, but a sustained increase of 15-20% that continues to this day.  (Green dashes show pre-release trend; red dotted line represents post-release trend.)

Based on that gi-normous spike, 130% above a typical Wednesday, plus the continued bump-up in Plone visitors, the Plone Metrics Person of the Year Award for 2010 goes to Eric.  By extension, this year's award goes out to all those who contributed to Plone 4 with code, testing, feedback, documentation, product upgrades, and all the myriad of details that make up a successful release. Well done, everyone!

In closing, let me paraphrase the immortal words of Bobby Flay: "So to all you awesome [Plonistas] out there, keep doing what you're doing, but ask yourself this... are you ready for a throwdown?"