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Harrogate Cybercafe -2

Posted By Paul Cooper |  last update 26-Sep 2010

We wanted some usage stats for the cybercafe - we have been surprised at how busy it has been, but there have been some questioning whether it is still necessary as so many have iphones, ipads and the rest. 

As in previous years, at break times there have often been queues awaiting empty seats, but thanks to the conference centre, there was somewehere eles for delegates to sit whilst eating. In London the internet cafe seats get used as 'dining chairs', as there is nowhere else to sit.

I installed apache on an old laptop together with webalizer make analyzing the logs easy , added a server index page and then we set the browsers to load this as the home page

Obvious there are inaccuracies. People will open more than one window, or dont always close the browser when they have finished. But most seemed to close browsers when finished to I think the stats are  'good enougn'.

Day     Hits        

 22     411 36.96%

23     460 41.37% 

24     213 19.15%

Surprisingly consistent. The Congress seemed to start to wind down from mid-morning Friday and the Exhibition Hall was being taken apart after lunch.

There were approximately 550 delegates. The internet cafe was open to all , Exhibitors, delegates, council members - say 650 in total ? . I suspect there are 'serial users' who make multiple visits each day as well as the once a day visits (which probably explains the higher use on the middle day).

With wireless access charges at the conference cntre £4 /hour it seems that the  Cybercafe is meeting a need. If delegates know its there, then they wont lug laptops etc  around the country.

I've spent the morning re-installing XP on the latpop that fell over on friday morning. I'd forgotten just how tedious reinstalling a windows OS actually is.  And its just as well one of us can RTFM and made the backup disks when we first got the machines ( thanks Tony).

Next problem is whether to dual boot , and if so what else to install.

 


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