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How wide should you make your web page?
Posted 15 years ago
Based on 22500 unique IP addresses over the past week, reddit users have these browser widths:
The numbers on the bottom are browser widths (minus 40), and the numbers on the side are the counts of unique visitors with that width.
Data collection
At the time this blog posting was made, my blog had hand-drawn borders in the page title. They were generated by a CGI program on the fly. For each visitor, a number about 40 pixels below your browser width is recorded in my server logs. I wrote a perl script to create a histogram for unique visitors, and pasted the result into gnumeric to create the chart.
Results
The peaks seem to correspond to 1024, 1280, 1400, 1600, 1920 screen widths, with 1280 being the greatest peak. This indicates that most people have their browser window maximized.
There is also a section of uniformity between 1000 and 1280. This seems to be a sweet spot among those who do not maximize their browsers.
Surprisingly, there are still a few people running at 800x600 resolutions. And one at over 2500 pixels across.
VP trees: A data structure for finding stuff fast
Let's say you have millions of pictures of faces tagged with names. Given a new photo, how do you find the name of person that the photo most resembles?
In the cases I mentioned, each record has hundreds or thousands of elements: the pixels in a photo, or patterns in a sound snippet, or web usage data. These records can be regarded as points in high dimensional space. When you look at a points in space, they tend to form clusters, and you can infer a lot by looking at ones nearby.
Spoke.com scam
Rant: Why do companies think they can make money by posting false information about you on the Internet?
Rules for Effective C++
The rules for safe C++ code are surprisingly controversial.
You can cheat so your web site seems faster than it is
You can make your web site seem faster without actually being faster.
Why Perforce is more scalable than Git
Branching on Perforce is kind of like performing open heart surgery. But here's why git can't hope to compete with it.
How a programmer reads your resume (comic)
People thought it was a comic, so I never corrected them.
Five essential steps to prepare for your next programming interview
They put you in a room, give you a problem, and stare at you while you fumble around with markers on a whiteboard for 45 minutes. With a little preparation, you'll look like a pro.
Finding Bieber: On removing duplicates from a set of documents
Using a locality sensitive hash, you can mark duplicates in millions of items in no time.
Exploring sound with Wavelets
Here's a program to create scalograms of sound files.