New COTS Board Format

Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation [REDI]:

A new VME card format is out for release aimed at the new VPX and VXS VME card standards [EURO Card]. The new REDI standard adds much more than just a mechanical standard defined in the IEEE-1101 mechanical standard. The new REDI specification changes much from the old IEEE1101 spec and now tries to handle water cooled devices as well; in addition, to air cooled and conduction cooled boards.

What garbed my eye was the new card formats, really the same 3U/6U sizes, would now handle up to 500 watts. What? how big is my power supply now. The largest power supply I could purchase was 750 watts, now I have to provide 500 watts per slot. The only REDI backplane I've seen appears to be four slots or 2000 watts. How much does a 2000W power supply weigh, I assume it's a switching power supply.

Very few companies are producing VPX boards or VXS boards which are both still new card specifications. In addition, to date, both the VPX cards and VXS cards seems to comply with the older IEEE1101 standard and not the new VITA48 standard [which is yet to be released?].

Note: To make this blog post add a new web page, and add it to the sitemap I had to cut a corner. The two new pages that cover REDI or IEEE1101 listings are copies of another page, with additional notes ~ they are not ready to be released yet. But, no one should be able to find them other than from this blog listing. Also my main computer has begun malfunctioning, forcing me to my backup system.

I'll fix this post over the week end and expand to the posting via comments. The new pages will also be updated this week end, and will link the VPX description to the REDI page and the VME description to the IEEE1101 specification page.

Related links: Equipment Chassis Manufacturers.

Why do I need backlinks

Backlinks are incoming links to a web page either from a page that's part of the same site or an external page on someone else's web site. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks provide two benefits to a web page [site]. First, a backlink brings in visitors to your page. Second, a backlink provides pagerank [PR] to the page being linked to.

A page, that has a pagerank, will pass a portion of that pagerank to all the other pages it links to. A page with a page rank of 5 will pass 'x' amount PR to each page it points to. The more pages it points to the less pagerank is passed to each page. So the page that points to you passes you some amount of pagerank.

Server Analytics refer to backlinks as Traffic Sources, or Referring Sites. The server stats indicate that over the last month there have been 14,167 visits from 1,402 sources [backlink] to interfacebus.com. These are sites that link to me on their own, I stopped looking for referral sites years ago.

Last night I updated the search bar on 20 pages and in the process found a few bad links. I also added the tag rel="nofollow" to a few listings to preserve some of my own page rank. You do not pass page rank when you use the 'nofollow' tag.

I updated the sitemap again today reducing the number of redundant links. Remember that site map does not reside on "my" site, so they are all backlinks.

I added a new page to the site yesterday and made a comment in my what's new blog, providing a link to the new page [backlink].

I was in the newsgroups today, posted a reply to some ones comment. I left this blog address as my sig ~ that's a backlink.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Free Web Pages

I guess having a web page for free is great, but man these things are crap. They're just to hard to use, if you know what your doing ~ does that make any sense.

I signed up for MS Office Live [Not Recommended] back in 2006 primarily because they offered a free web page, space and a free address, for ever. I picked the site name [Address Removed], so I would lock in the *.net version of my site name. Microsoft registered the name during sign-up, and continues to make the payments each year so I hold the name. Yes, if you check WHOIS you will see that the site name is registered in my name, but I make no payments. They only offer a free address for the first year now. [UPDATE: Microsoft stop making payments in 2010, so I let the address expire.]

Any way my last update to that site was mid 2006 so I figured I add a few new links, correct some spelling issues and so on. I wish! The program would run-on all my links so they all pointed to the same page. It would append an 'http' to my link so when I copied the link from the browser I would end up with 'httphttp', which does not work.........

Guess that's why I stopped using the damn thing.

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Free web pages at Google Sites; Engineering Data Site Map.

I've generated more pages local than I have using their system. I also use the web space to hold large graphics to off-load downloads from my server.
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Web Site Usage

I compared January of 2008 with Jan. 2007 for Pageviews, Visits, and Pages-per-Visit. You can see the data in the chart to the left. Like any graphic here, click on it to in large the picture.

The chart basically shows that there is no real difference between this year and last. According to Google Analytics the site is short 3,000 visits and 30,000 page views ~ not a big difference.. Green is last year, Blue is this year.

I would have liked to see the Pageviews and Pages/Visit numbers to have increased over last year.
I was hoping that by adding the Google search bar to each of the pages, and having it search the site and not the internet the Pages/Visits would increase. However; it may be that the site is so optimized that a new visitor to the site [from a search engine] arrives on the exact page their looking for ~ reducing the page views.

New visits to the site are 78.93% this year vs. 77.96% last year, but these number are really about the same every month.

AWSTATS [Unique Visitors] indicates 153,351 for 2008, and only 148,633 for last year [Jan.].
The last two years have been flat and so far this year looks no different. {I've blogged about reason why ~ older PC buses that receive fewer and fewer hits a year}

New Site Uploaded

I spent the last few days fixing the site map that is generated from running Xenu. The generated site map starts with a great many redundant page listings, so I have to go in and remove a lot of them. The current page size for the sitemap is 505kB, while the one already on the web is 462kB.

I'll go ahead and upload the new map and up-date over the rest of the week. My system indicates 1143 html files [pages], as does Google. Google indicates I have 1444 indexed urls, and a total of 1606 total URLs. The difference is due to a number of orphan pages that capture misspelled page addresses.

Any way the 80 odd pages that were generated over the last few months are now part of the sitemap, and now have an external page link that points to them.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization [SEO] is the process of configuring or setting up your web site so that it is search engine friendly. It really accounts for much more than that by insuring that a web page ranks high in a search result via key word placement. "Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site." I practice SEO; I make sure the title or page address relates to the topic, insure the first paragraph describes the topic and so on.

Any way, I just ran the program Xenu to validate the links on the site. The robot found only four bad links, and a ton of redirects. I don't think many of these companies practice SEO. They seen to change web names, redirect to a new address for awhile and than go back to the old address.... I really don't get it. I don't even list a few companies any longer because I continue to see dead pages as they keep changing their page addresses...

I should be up-loading a new sitemap tomorrow once I get a chance to delete some of the redundant listings in the report. I also ran Gsitecrawler and generated an XML sitemap for the search engines, Google is still checking it.

On a side note, the web site seems to be going well. Download speed is being increased by deleting HTML comments, or breaking up large pages into smaller pages ~ and making the pages more focused on one particular topic. Adding a search bar to all the pages, so the site may be searched from any page. Changing the search bar so that it defaults to a website search and not the web [some pages had search bars that searched the web, while some defaulted to searching the site which could be a little confusing. I also continue to add more pages, better than 80 pages in the last four months. Google now indicates 1606 URLs submitted.

Site / Server bandwidth remains at 57kB/visits, but I think the savings from reducing the html comments is being off-set by adding the search bar to the hundred's of pages that did not have one.

Not really web site related, but I've been trading out the older google referral links in favor of their new referral code. The newest code selects one of a hundred ads, while their old code would only run google related products ~ Adwords, firefox and so on. Plus the html code is smaller in most cases as one referral link may replace three other older google referrals.

Jan 2008 was the best month ever in terms of visits, and from the site history this month should be even better. March is higher than Jan, while Feb is lower January. New content is always being added, and html coding mistakes are fixed as they are found. ~ All is well

Sitemap Correction

I just noticed that a version of my sitemap was out on my server, it's an older version. Or perhaps a version up-loaded by mistake and not up-loaded to my Google Page Creator site. I use Google page creator to serve a number of pages and graphics to off-load the bandwidth from my server. Any way here is the correct address for the SiteMap.

I site map is used to list all the pages on a particular web site, like a table of contents. Sitemaps are just another way to show available pages. If you run a web site you should have a sitemap for a number of reasons. The best reason to produce a site-map is that it brings all web pages to the same level. Pages may be four levels down from the index page on a web site, using a site map brings all pages up to the same level. A search engine reduces the importance of pages for each level under the index page. Also lower level pages may not be spidered as often as other pages.

So the wrong sitemap was being downloaded around 5 times a day. That's 15,000kB a day at 300k bytes in file size. I've been working on reducing the server bandwidth over the last 3 months, there are a number other posts relating to increasing down-load speed / lowering bandwidth. The current bandwidth is 57.74kB/visit, which is no reduction at all.

Fixing this issue may help to lower the size/visit numbers. With all obsolete addresses, the page was not deleted but replaced by a redirect page of 10kB which is much smaller than 300kB.

Never delete a page address if you can avoid it, you never really know who may be pointing or linking to it. Delete the page and lose a link ~ never a good thing.

Actually the page was viewed 278 times this year or 834,000,00 Bytes ~

USB Drive adds Permeate Memory to a Computer

I added one of my older USB thumb drives to my computer to add more memory to the computer system. Yes you can plug in a USB stick into a USB slot and tell the computer to add that memory to the system memory. The USB Thumb Drive is only a 512MB device, but it's a spare stick so why not increase the computer memory for free. The PC is a Velocity Micro with 2GB of DDR2 memory, via two 1GB memory modules. More about the current PC used to run the web site... Oh, I run MS VISTA.

When you plug in the USB stick a pop-up window will give you the option at adding into system memory, but may not. I tried this with a 1GB Geek Squad drive but did not see the option to add it into system memory. Once I looked at the drive I figured that because it seemed to be configured as a CD drive it would not let me. Remember many USB sticks are setup to read and lock the data so you can pull it out at any time. With USB system memory, you want it to read/write as fast as possible. So you may need to reformat the USB drive to see the option to add the drive into system memory.

So I should be able to add more data as a comment in a few days....