Top 10 Posts of 2013 and Stats on CNXSoft Blog

This is the last day of the year, and just like in 2012, I’ll look back on the main trends of this year,  post a list of the top 10 posts of 2013 on cnx-software.com, and add some fun stats about the site and my visitors. 2013 has been the year of quad core media players and mini PCs, especially those based on Rockchip RK3188, XBMC is now featured in many Android STBs, “big.LITTLE” and “Octa-core” have been the buzz words on the application processor front, Google has entered the HDMI TV sticks market with the ChromeCast, and is competing with Miracast / DLNA TV dongles, we’ve gotten more and more low cost Linux development boards, crowdfunding has almost gone mainstream, and the Internet of things has started to take off thanks to new technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy.

I’ve compiled the list using data from Google Analytics, filtered post from 2013, and sorted them by decreasing number of page views. Here are the top 10 posts of 2013:

1. GPUs Comparison: ARM Mali vs Vivante GCxxx vs PowerVR SGX vs Nvidia Geforce ULP (January 2013) – You’ll find plenty of SoC comparison on the Internet, but GPU are sort of a mystery, and the post shows it’s rather complex to compare the different solutions. Nevertheless, many people were interested in knowing the differences between Mali, PowerVR, Vivante… GPUs, especially with regards to performance, and this post was clearly the most popular of the year.
2. Matricom G-Box Midnight MX2 Android TV Box Review (May 2013) – Matricom G-Box Midnight MX2 was one of the best XBMC Android devices I tested at the time, and also generated some heated discussions about XBMC and open source.
3. Installing Android Studio IDE in Ubuntu – Hello World Application (May 2013) – Speed matters. As I was one of the first to explain how to install the new Android Studio IDE in Ubuntu, the post got linked from several sources and became relatively popular.
4. Ubuntu 12.04 Now Boots on Rockchip RK3188 mini PCs (T428, MK908, Rikomagic MK802 IV…) (June 2013) – RK3188 based Android mini PCs became popular in 2013, because of the performance and price, but quite a few people were, and are still, interested in finding out how to install Linux distributions, and in particular, Ubuntu on their device.
5. $32 iPush Wi-Fi DLNA / Miracast Adapter for Android (May 2013) – iPush was one of the first DLNA / Miracast / Airplay TV dongle for a reasonable price. It turned out there are several versions of the device not all of them supporting Miracast. The post got a traffic spike when ChromeCast was announced, as some people mentioned the iPush as an alternative.
6. How to Run Android Apps in Linux with AndroVM (March 2013) – Android’s got plenty of app, and I though it would be nice is there was an easy way to run then in a Linux desktop. Luckily, AndroVM, now GenyMotion, made it relatively easily.
7. BeagleBone Black vs Raspberry Pi – Features and Price Comparison (April 2013) – In 2012, the Raspberry Pi disrupted the hobbyist board market with its $35 price tag. But in 2013, it got some tough competition will plenty of more powerful boards selling for less than $60. One of them is the BeagleBone Black selling for $45, and AFAIK, the most popular among “alternatives”. Since the board has similar price, people wanted to know which one was good for them. To date, 2.3 million Raspberry Pi boards have been sold, against at least 100,000 BeagleBone Black.
8. Quad Cores SoC Comparison: Rockchip RK3188 vs Exynos 4412 vs Tegra 3 (April 2013) -Comparisons are often popular, and this one with the top three quad core processors at the beginning of 2013 was too.
9. How to Root Rockchip RK3188 mini PCs (March 2013) – As Rockchip RK3188 mini PCs become popular, people wanted to know how to root them.
10. Ubuntu Linaro 12.11 with 2D/3D Mali-400 GPU Acceleration on ODROID-X Development Board (February 2013) – It can be a pain to get a working Linux distribution with GPU acceleration on ARM based hardware, so when I tried Hardkernel image on ODROID-X, and found out it was actually pretty good, it generated some buzz.

Some posts from 2012 were still popular and would have made it to the list including posts related to WM8850-MID tablet, Cubieboard Getting Started Guide, and 84MB Raspberry Pi minimal image.

Now let’s see some stats for cnx-software.

The site averaged about 300,000 page views per month, although as expected, two months holiday did not really help with traffic. Google Analytics reports a total of 2,239,006 visits, 1,306,200 unique visitors, and 3,579,860 page views for the year.

About half of the traffic came from search engines, mainly Google, with the remaining halves from over 4,000 other websites. The top 10 search terms and referral are shown in the table below:

Let’s find out more about my visitors now.

CNX Software is quite cosmopolitan. US and UK visitors represent about 22%, with the rest of the traffic coming from countries where English may not be the first language.

Most people still use Windows, but Linux still has a nice 18% traffic share (25.5% including Android and Chrome OS) which is well above average. Chrome is ahead a Firefox, with Internet Explorer far behind.

Site Speed figure are now available in GA, so for fun I’ve checked which countries, with over 1,000 page views per year, had the fastest and slowest average page load times on this blog.

You can consider yourself a lucky one if you live in Switzerland, Norway, and New Zealand, as pages load in less of 5 seconds average, but if you live in the Philippines, and especially in China and Nigeria, you may not be so lucky as page load times average over 60 seconds.

That’s all for today, and 2013, so I’ll join this year gadgets and boards (pictured below) to wish you a very happy and prosperous new year 2014, which promise to be interesting with the first ARM 64-bit based consumer devices, Chinese big.LITTLE processors coming to market, cheaper and more powerful devices, the Internet of things hopefully becoming mainstream, new mobile operating systems such as Tizen, Firefos OS possibly gaining momentum, and Linux with GPU acceleration for all thanks to Ubuntu 14.04 (and libhybris).

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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