Thursday, June 19, 2008

Link checking and SEO stuff


Hmm, I've been hand checking some pages and have found some bad links on the web site. Maybe I rely to much on Xenu to check the links on the site.

I see some old re-directs that have been fixed, just to clear the redundant listings. But what I'm more concerned about are the dozen pages found that point to the isp, indicating that the web site is gone. I assume that the Xenu robot does not detect those changes ...... That's not good. Still a few bad links out of 5,000 isn't that bad.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Open Source Office Applications


To my surprise I found a few free office type applications today (web based). Server side applications are fine, assuming we don't lose the internet connection. This link provides a listing of office tools, both local and server side.

Here are the addresses to these new application;
http://www.spresent.com/
http://product.thinkfree.com/
http://www.zoho.com/

The 'zoho' seems to show the most promise, I'll down-load or sign in now....... I'm in!

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Is there a Browser War?


It looks like it just may be a matter of time before the war is over or comes to a draw. The data from the web site indicates that Firefox only inches ahead and only in sub-percentages. Seems a small increase in Firefox usage.

After a 1,000,000 visits Firefox still gets the same 28% of users. What is that a few thousand new users over the last few months? I started a new poll, left of screen for Browser usage.....

Btw I use both IE and Firefox, so my usage is 50/50. Both Browsers are set up to open multi-windows on start-up. The previous topic was "The Browser Battle Update", from 4/9/08.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Page Rank & Listing of Manufacturers

One of the sections of the site is a listing of Manufacturers in alphabetic order, instead of by topic. The alphabetic listing of Manufacturers spans 94 pages. The section received 1,255 pageviews in the last 30 days, and 8,205 page views this year. The alphabetic index page, which also happens to be letter 'A' receives most of the hits, and the rest are spread over the alphabet.

The section help people find companies when they might not be sure of the name, and it indicates who may have purchased the company if it changed hands. It's a lot of work keeping all the links active and valid, but it does seem to serve a purpose.

Any way, several months ago I broke up many of the pages to make them smaller, reducing the number of links per page. The new pages started with a zero page rank, which is normal, but they still have not recovered. Worse still, I checked one page today and the content didn't even show up during a search ~ meaning the page was not even indexed by Google.

Pages with a zero page rank:
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Amd'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Asq'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Be'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Bl'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Br'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Cm'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Con'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Cp'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Dem'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ec'. html code updated,links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'El'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Em'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Fm'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'G'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Gen'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Gl'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Go'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Hb'.
html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Hj'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Il'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'In'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Int'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Intel'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Jd'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ke'.
html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ki'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'L'.
html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Mo'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Nik'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Oo'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'P'.
html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Po'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ram'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ren'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sen'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sig'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sk'.
html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sp'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Tb'.
html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Th'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Us'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'V'.
html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ve'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Vi'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Vm'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Wi'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Z'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..

Wow, 47 pages with a Google page Rank issue ~ that's not good. But what is the problem with the pages?

I did notice that the entire section declares xhtml 'strict' coding, so I updated a few to 'transitional' coding today. The pages will validate declaring 'transitional' coding, but that can't be the issue or they would all have a zero page rank.

Any non '.com' web site link has a "rel = nofollow" in the link so even if the link were bad Goggle would ignore it. The 'rel=no follow' must be on 20% of the links, making them save regardless.

I'm running Xenu tonight to check the site for bad links, but that program will not indicate if some other site has taken over an address ~ so I'll have to hand check each link to insure the page opens to the site listed. Xenu reports 8 bad links (0.13%), with 5937 good url's.

I hand checked a few pages, see the text above, but I don't see any issues. I don't mind so much about losing the page rank, but I would like to have the data searchable. I could be missing a number of visitors because the page are in Google's supplemental listing.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

New Sitemap Up-loaded


Using the GsiteCrawler program two separate XML site maps were generated, one for interfacebus.com and one for serialphy.com. Google reports 109 urls (pages) uploaded for serialphy and 1673 urls for interfacebus.

Looks like more than 50 new pages have been added over the last 3 months, sense the last sitemap generation. However the site's HTML site map was updated as new pages were added.

Google Analytics reports 985,815 visits, with 1,880,906 page views. Both of those numbers are down from the same time last year, by 15,000 visits (it was off-line yesterday).....

GsiteCrawler is free like half a dozen other programs that generate xml sitemaps.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Digital Video Connector Identification

I got an email a few hours ago from some one trying to identify a connector on the back of a PC card. The video connector appeared to be DVI connector, but had 35 pins instead of 29 pins.

For the first few minutes I was wondering what the connector was, but after a few clicks on the web site I replied to the e-mail with an answer. I found two other connector styles with the correct amount of pins, and that looked just like a DVI plug:
Enhanced Video Connector, EVC.
Plug and Display, P & D. released in 1996

I think both these interfaces are dated, but many obsolete interfaces are still in production, ISA cards for example. Any way there are newer video interfaces out there to replace even the DVI bus; HDMI, and UDI to name two.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

USB 3.0 Specification

Looks like the new USB standard is due out soon. Other than the transfer rate (4.8 Gbit/s, 600 MB/s) and some data about the new connectors I have not found any other data on the specification yet.

USB 3.0 products are not due out until at least 2009, so you still have awhile.

Update; so there are a few products starting to be introduced now, as of 9/09. Of course my PC will not take advantage of of 3.0 USB device and I don't have any planes on getting a new PC this year either.

So;
Description of USB 2.0.
Description of USB 3.0.