Digital TV

I'm reminded that at midnight on February 17, 2009, federal law requires that all full-power television broadcast stations stop broadcasting in analog format and broadcast only in digital format.

As of March 1, 2007, all television receivers shipped in interstate commerce or imported into the United States must contain a digital tuner.

A special antenna generally is not needed to receive digital signals. You may have antenna issues, however, if your current antenna does not receive UHF signals (channels 14 and above) well, because most DTV stations are on UHF channels.

In other words if you don't have cable or satellite or a TV with a Digital Tuner, you receive snow.

• Standard Definition TV (SDTV) - SDTV is the basic level of quality display and resolution for both analog and digital. Transmission of SDTV may be in either the traditional (4:3) or widescreen (16:9) format.
  
  

• Enhanced Definition TV (EDTV) - EDTV is a step up from Analog Television. EDTV comes in 480p widescreen (16:9) or traditional (4:3) format and provides better picture quality than SDTV, but not as high as HDTV.
  
  

• High Definition TV (HDTV) - HDTV in widescreen format (16:9) provides the highest resolution and picture quality of all digital broadcast formats. Combined with digitally enhanced sound technology, HDTV sets new standards for sound and picture quality in television. (Note: HDTV and digital TV are not the same thing -- HDTV is one format of digital TV.)

Page Content

Content is added to the web site all the time. In some cases a new page and topic is added, other times new content is added to an existing page. In either case I do not expect the search engines to find the new material for a month, although the site gets crawled all the time to the tune of 300 pages a day.

New page address will not receive a page rank for about 3 months after the page is posted, so I also assume any new page will not do well for that length of time. However, any new content will benefit a visitor if they stumble upon the information.

Over the last few months the Google Search bar has been added to more and more pages. Again it will only display pages in a search that have been spidered. The amount of income generated from using the search bar is shown in the chart to the left. Income has increased as the bar was added to more pages. Many pages still do not display the search bar.

Unique Visits for 07

An updated chart showing unique visitors to interfacebus.com from 2001 to June 2007. Total visitors, or returning visits range between 1.5x and 2.5x that number. Total page views so far this year are 2,131,154. Page views for 2006 were 3,688,317. Traffic from robots account for another 100,000 hits a-month [ 800MB of bandwidth] which are not shown. Normal traffic accounts for over 10GB of bandwidth a month. March 2007 saw 13.28GB of bandwidth usage. Total pages in the site are 1,220 as indicated in the Google cache. In coming web links; 2483 different url's, however most link to a page other than the home page.

Adsense Earnings

The web site interfacebus.com has now reached $100,000 in earnings from the Google Adsense program. In fact its $88 from reaching that point, however I will not have an opportunity to post when it does hit the mark around 10 am on Friday.

The picture to the left shows the monthly income from the program on a per month basis. July 07 is not shown because the month is on-going. Also, although income has been declining this year that is partly due to a reduction in the amount of hits to the site. For example June was down 20,000 hits [45,000 page views] from May. Previous blog posting show hits and or page views to the web site. It's common for the site to rise or fall 20,000 hits around a center of 120,000 hits.

The cost of running the web site is about $20/month for the server space and $6/year for the domain name ~ or less than $330 a year. The site returns its cost in a few days, with all other income as profit. Profit last year was $69,000, estimated profit this year $50,000.

Proceeds have declined, but much of the last few months have been spent updating content instead of optimizing ad placement ~ it's a time trade-off.

Up-keep about 2 hours a day to add new data, but the site runs its self, facts don't change. External links are checked once a month.

Why do I post this; why not:
The value of the web site could be based on any number of calculations; a common value is 4x the last 12 months ~ $250,000. The site e-mail address is located on the Home page. An e-mail with a figure exceeding that amount may receive a reply, any other amount will be ignored.

Can I post this information:
Google Terms and Conditions;
7. ......"However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.".... These numbers are accurate, based on the checks received.

Year 2006 1,550,092 unique visits, with 3,688,317 page impressions.

IDE Hard Drive

I saw an article yesterday indicating that Seagate would be dropping support for the IDE interface on its Harddrives this year. The IDE or ATA interface was in common usage until Serial ATA [SATA] came out in 2004. Once SATA was released the original ATA bus started to be called Parallel ATA [PATA] because it used a parallel bus while SATA was a serial interface.
Motherboards have been shipping with headers for either interface from 2004 on to support legacy drives. However as more companies continue to stop supporting the older [slower] PATA bus these interfaces may be dropped to save money.

SATA is an interface used between a Mother Board and an internal drive bay. A variant of SATA called eSATA may be used from the Motherboard to a Hard Disk Drive [HDD] external to the PC Case.

New Site Map

I posted a new site map out to Google pages; interfacebus_sitemap. I orphaned the older page, instead of up-dating it because of the file size. Normally while coping the code either the browser or the up-load crashes. So the html file was up-loaded.

The site map was generated from running Xenu, which is the program used to check links on the site. It lists all pages on the site and all pages that are linked from each page ~ so there is a lot of duplication. Many of the redundant pages have been removed. Over the next week the page will continue to be reduced. The current file size is 496k bytes

This sitemap differs from the XML site map used by the search engines.

Page Impressions by Section

Here is a break down of web site page impressions by section. I use Google Channels to divide the site into its major sections. Most of the channels are self defining. What isn't clear are how many pages make up any one group of pages. The number of pages are an estimate, but the page impressions are what was recorded.
A previous blog posting defines many of the major sections. This also sort of tracks what each section earns, except the Homepage which does not really earn that much, although it gets a great many hits. With the Home page, most people just click on one of the major page links to move to their topic.
These numbers cover Jan1 to July 20 2007.

Buses: 300 pages; 1,145,015 page impressions (Bus descriptions)
Hardware: 300 pages; 734,509 page impressions (Hardware manufacturers)
Website: 100 pages; 362,200 page impressions (Engineering Design)
Homepage: 2 pages; 107,013 page impressions (index.html)
Dictionary: 100 pages; 52,886 page impressions
Orphan: 20 pages; 49,717 page impressions (pages no longer link in)
Software: 12 pages; 16,728 page impressions
Manufacturers: 50 pages; 14,053 page impressions (Alphabetic company list)
Translated: 12 pages; 12,716 page impressions (non-English)
How to Chassis: 20 pages; 7,249 page impressions (Chassis design)
Blog: 250 pages; 5,431 page impressions (this blog)
Memory Obsolete: 6 pages; 4,846 page impressions
Google Page Creater: 20 pages; 3,646 page impressions
Search: 1 page; 2,862 page impressions
How to Adsense: 25 pages; 1,690 page impressions
Bad Address: 20 pages; 166 page impressions (mis-spelled page addresses)
Total page impressions: 2,521,035 page impressions

Site Organization

interfacebus.com is set up like a tree. The main site pages are displayed at the bottom of this page and are some what self explanatory. The main section is divided into a number of sub-sections. Clicking the main icon will display the next section in greater detail. The largest sections are; 1. Components, 2. Buses, 3. Reference. The Reference section contains many pages because of the large Dictionary, Glossaries, and Acronyms sections. There are a great many interface buses for both consumer and industrial computers. The Buses section contains both obsolete and cutting edge bus descriptions. The same for Component manufacturers, however this section is mostly links to OEM companies. The Equipment section is also mostly links to OEM manufacturers.
Distributors: A listing of companies that sell parts and equipment, but are not manufacturers
Components: A list of companies that manufacture piece parts, IC's, Connectors, LED's .....
Equipment: A list of companies that manufacture assemblies; Chassis, Computers, Backplanes ..
Software: A list of companies that produce either consumer or industrial software packages
Standards: List of Standards Organizations, On-line Publications, and Book stores
Buses: Descriptions of all types of computer interface buses w/ interface IC's & Connector manufacturers
Design: Back-ground info on component size, Temperature ratings, Derating and so on
Reference: Every thing else; AWG size, Jobs, PWB info, VHDL, Dictionaries, Acronyms

New sub-sections are added all the time, as are new links. Dead links are removed as their found. Use the search link located on most pages to find a particular page. Google is showing 1,220 pages in its listing.

Blog Hits

Why does interfacebus.com do so well, but not the Blog? This blog only receives about 1000 hits a month. I'm ok with that because I use it to promote the web site, but unsure why the hits do not increase. Maybe just the topics? This is a graph of the last year and a half, with the 'Y' axis showing the number of hits. The high points are when the blog is promoted or when a topic appears to be interesting.

The blog does make an income, but it isn't much ~ with only 20 to 50 page impressions a day

Slow week

Normally US holidays produce a slow down in hits to the site. This week is no exception, with only 50% of incoming hits originating from the US.
America = 15,753
Europe = 8,954
Asia = 6,869
Oceania = 4,751
Africa = 2,184
It's expected, but discomforting. Instead of 8,000 hits a day I only saw 6,000 hits a day this week. However that's still better than a normal weekend. Earnings were down as well, with only 56,000 page impressions.

Google Adsense Earnings

So I was out looking at Google's Terms and Conditions, and I see this;

7. ......"However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program."....

Any way interfacebus.com is about to hit the $100,000 mark in earnings from running the Google Adsense program. I've been using the program for about a year and a half, and the amount the site generates is different every month. I should hit $100,000 by the middle of next month or the end of this month depending on how things go.

Keeping the site on-line, getting a decent amount of hits [FAQ] and so on all come into play.

I also started to run the LinkShare affiliate program for the last 2 months, but have not seen any income yet. However, those banners are only on a few dozen pages ~ with about 6000 page impressions so far. Before using Adsense the site made money by running banners from a number of different engineering companies.

Any how a few months ago I started a small section of pages to describe how to start a site and make money running ads ~  Just some hints I've learned while running this site ~ may give a jump start to a new site, or help optimise an on-going web site.

Hits to www.interfacebus.com double about every year to year and 1/2. I expect 1,600,000 unique hits this year with 3,700,000 page views [impressions]

Hard Drive Interfaces

I found an interesting graph today showing the up-coming status of different interfaces for either the 2.5" and 3.5" Hard Drive formats. The 3.5 inch Hard Disk Drive format is the preferred server format, while the 2.5 inch size is the preferred PC format.

In the 3.5 inch format:
Fiber Channel [FC] is anticipated to double, or increase from 5 million units to 10 million from this year out to 2010.
SCSI is predicted to drop from 20 million units this year to 15 million units by 2010.
SAS [Serial SCSI] is predicted to drop from 20 million units to 12 million units by 2010.
SATA is anticipated to increase shipments from 35 million units now to 60 million units by 2010.

In the 2.5 inch format:
FC jumps from 35 million units now to 65 million units
SATA jumps from 35 million units now to 65 million units
SAS jumps from 30 million units now to 55 million units

So SCSI, seems to be losing the server market, in either the parallel or serial format, while Serial SCSI [SAS] is increasing in the PC market [reduced cost].
Fiber Channel usage is increasing in both formats.
Serial ATA [SATA] is also increasing in both formats, which makes sense.

What does not make sense is that SAS seems to be declining, SAS uses the same interface as SATA so why the decline? I have to assume that the legacy programs still require the out-dated SCSI interface.