​One of the tasks done by the scripts I use to explore hospital websites is that of taking screenshots so I can compare them historically through time.  By doing this, one can quickly observe the tendencies on website designs and the differences between them.  The gallery below shows these screenshots. 

​I’ve collected a new list of hospitals and their respective URLs to make this ‘Seed #2’ This list is created on June 2016 and it contains 946 hospitals. 
 
Here’s the full list:

Sniffing the user agent is a common practice to detect the browser being used to request a page. This technique can be done in a few ways and it is mostly used to send the user to a mobile specific site. With the advent of responsive design, this practice is sometimes no longer necessary as the site will render correctly on a mobile device.  I took the sites on the seed #1 to see which sites would still try to sniff my user agent via JavaScript. Here are the results: 1,276 sites did try to detect the user agent, while 114 did not.

The following analysis was done using the seed #1 dataset and it determines the most commonly used HTML tags.  This dataset contains the home page HTML of 1,657 hospitals. By parsing the source code of these sites, I was able to determine the most frequently used and the site with most tags on its home page.

First, these are the top 10 hospitals with the most tags. The average number of tags on pages in this dataset is 390 tags, while the median is 320. 

This is what I am calling ‘Seed #1’ which is the dataset I am using to analyze on the coming blog posts. Even though I have years worth of data, I am planning to start small with a list of  1,657  hospital sites. This list is dated mid June 2015 and the results of analyzing reflect the snapshot of this date