We're proud to unveil the fully redesigned SIDN Labs statistics website: the all-new stats.sidnlabs.nl goes live today. The site presents our stats on .nl and the wider internet in an attractive and accessible form, for use both by researchers and by the general public. It's been set up to make extension easy, so that we can add data from future studies as it becomes available.
Layout and structure
With the new design come various changes to the way the information is organised and presented. We've reconsidered the best type of graphic for displaying information on each topic, for example, and we've improved the accompanying written information.
On the home page, there's now a tile for each subsection of the site, with a navigation-friendly graphic. So it's easy to see what information is available in the various subsections.
The general section headings -- Registration, DNSSEC, Datasets, etc -- remain unchanged. But under each heading you'll now find a number of related graphs. For example, under Registration, there are graphs showing the total number of registered .nl domain names and the number of DNSSEC-enabled domain names. From those graphs, it's easy to see that, while growth in the overall number of registrations remains sluggish, the number of DNSSEC-enabled domain names has shot up to 52 per cent.
Geo-information
On the home page, we've added a map of the Netherlands showing the estimated number of .nl domain names in each municipality. The deeper the colour that a municipality is shown in, the more registrations there are, relative to the rest of the country. The absolute number of registered domain names in a municipality can be seen by hovering your mouse pointer over that municipality. Interestingly, it isn't just the big cities that have high registration densities (orange). Municipalities where big registrars are based are also hotspots. Look at Ede, the home of BIT, for instance.
More geographical information is available on the Network tab, where you can check out the locations of the DNS resolvers that send queries to the .nl name servers.
Time selection
Another new feature is that all the graphs on each page are now linked to a shared time selection tool. Using the tool, you can adjust the time period covered by the graphs on the page. All that page's graphs are then automatically redrawn to show your selected time period. Our statistics date back to 2014.
Tweet away!
Each graph now has a supporting information page, which is opened using the 'i' button above the graph on the right. The supporting information includes background details, such as how the data has been obtained. There's also a URL for the graph itself, so that you can include it in a tweet or embed it on a web page, for example.
Scope for extension
Finally, the new site design makes it easier to add graphs in the future. So new data from research projects by SIDN Labs can be incuded, for instance. The site's exensible design has already been utilised to incorpoarte data from our DNS-EMAP system, which has recently been deployed to measure the use of secure mail in the .nl zone. The graph based on the data is on the Mail tab.
Feedback welcome!
You'll find lots more interesting information about the evolution of the .nl zone on the new website. Take a look and let us know what you think! Just drop a line to sidnlabs@sidn.nl. We'd also love to hear from you if you think there's something we should add. Where possible, we'll develop a new graph showing the information you're after and put it on the site.
