G2 Crawler News

My focus lately has been on hub uptimes. There is a new page showing hub uptime distribution graphs. It gives a visual representation of some of the categories on the uptimes page. The overall hub uptime distribution graph also features two vertical lines. The red line shows where the average hub uptime is and the green line shows where the median hub uptime is. Eventually all of the graphs will have this extra information.

The other major addition is to the uptimes page. The second table of information is new and expands on the information in the first table. The new table shows for each grouping/category:

• average
• median
• minimum uptime
• maximum uptime
• the total number of hubs that fit this category
• the number of hubs below the average for this category
• the number of hubs above the average for this category
• the ratio of hubs under the average and over the average

On the vendors page I added back the showing of the GDNA data. But for now no hubs will be showing up as GDNA. GnucDNA does not send any vendor code at all so the current crawler just shows them as UNKN. The old crawler looked at the hub’s User-Agent to figure out if it was GnucDNA and then set the vendor code appropriately. So while new data won’t be logged the same way the trend of GDNA can at least be seen again on the yearly vendor graph.

Lastly, there is an experimental feature that shows where each hub is on a geographic map if they provided that information in their profile. Of course most users do not reveal this information and some lie about their location but it can still be a lot of fun. You get to see that the G2 network has users all over the world and they’re all interconnected. This mapping feature is experimental because it requires a fast computer in order to work smoothly. So give it a try but understand that it may not work well for everyone. In my experience Chrome did really well while Firefox and IE did poorly so if you already have Chrome installed you might give this feature a try in that browser even if you don’t use it for anything else.

Green lines are used to show hubs that are connected together. Clicking on a marker will reveal additional information about that hub:

• username if provided
• name and version of the software they are using
• number of hubs and leaves they are connected to
• the actual country they are in based on their IP address and MaxMind’s GeoIP
• the exact coordinates they provided

I hope you like the additions. Keep the suggestions coming.