End of Year up-date

I first posted this chart on the 16th, but I wanted to post it again with the new data. It's one day short of the data for the year, but I don't except to see that many visitors today. The important point is that 2009 brings in the most web visits at around 2,436,499 visits [graph], and 4,077,367 page views.

The what's new blog [new Engineering Pages] has 67 entries which indicate at a minimum 67 new pages were added to the web site this year. But because in many cases more than one page is mentioned there could be as many as 80 new pages this year.

Although most of the time I only make some small formatting change to a web page, it still counts as an update; there have been 366 different pages updated this month, and 464 pages updated in November. The point is that the website [interfacebus] is always being updated.

I'm still troubled by the number of pages only receiving a minimum number of page visits per year. Here are just a few;
Companies making electronic equipment.
Definition of Interference.
Industrial  Board Formats.
MIL-39009 Resistor Derating.
GPIB Connector -55138 CID.

Chart: AWSTATS, Number of Visits per year for 2005 to 2009.

Interest in Personal Computer Buses

I figured I would post a few pages that have seen a reduction in page views from this year to last.

The page covering the USB interface had a reduction of 0.12%, which is nothing.

Now the PCIe page had a reduction of 17.20%, which is not good. The PCI express interface is still the fastest interface on the PC so I'm surprised to see a drop in visits that high. However it looks like much of the drop occurred in the first six months of this year, it started to make a come back after that.

The SATA interface also had a 3.23% drop from last year. Again this is a new interface which should still have some interest, so I would expect more page views.

The older Hard drive interface [IDE] also had a drop of 30.98%. The Parallel IDE interface [PATA] is obsolete so I would expect a drop in page views here, but maybe not that high. There should still be many computer users that run this older bus style. You would thing this would be the time people start looking up data on the bus as they begin to suffer hard drive problems.

Also had a 19.86% reduction in page views for the FireWire Bus. However I think I can under stand this reduction. I think I wrote something about some Apple computers not even shipping with the Firewire interface any longer. I've never even had a Firewire product.

Yet another obsolete PC bus, the RS232 interface also had a 6.48% drop from last year. I don't think I have any RS232 gear any longer, for a few years now. I still see RS232 ports on new PCs, which continues to surprise me.

Last one, for now, the PCI bus showed a 27.86% reduction in page views. I would like to say this interface is obsolete too, but I can't because there are many PC cards produced in the PCI format. Many card functions can't be purchased in the PCIe format. I think the PCI slot will be on motherboards for years to come.

So interest in topics comes and goes over time. Remember that the search engines are always re-ordering their results too. So some of these drops could be due to sliding down lower in the search results. The chart shows around a 20% increase in page-views over the last few months.

Graphic; PageViews [per week] so far this year.

There are 30,442 pages in the list I'm reading off Google Analytics, but there are only around 1,600 pages on the web site. The rest of those pages are search pages or mis-spelled [404] pages. This site does not have 30,000 different web pages. I should have cleaned that up a bit and re-typed that text.

Low page views

With the end of the year just a few days away I figured I would get in one more posting showing pages that received less than 365 pages views, or less than one hit a-day. There are many more than just the three or four I'll post today. I think I'll post pages that received less than 100 page views;

Chassis Panel Meters. 99 page views
Chassis Terms. 88 page views
ESD Terms. 77 page views
Radar Terms. 66 page views
Compliance Testing. 55 page views
OEM Manufactures. 43 page views
iSCSI Protocol. 33 page views
2N6546 Temp Derating. 22 page views
CableCard. 10 page views
And the list could go on, many of the pages [under 10 pageviews] in my list are just mis-spelled web addresses. Of course many new pages also have a low page view. There were about 138 pages that received between 50 and 100 page views. Maybe another 200 pages that received less than 50 hits.
Pageviews so far this year 4,054,604.

Java Script Disabled in Broswer

I've been off-line much of the time for the last two days. Well half the web was working but most every thing to do with Google would not function at all. Or after restarting a web browser some Google pages would load while others would not. In fact even if a page would load, as soon as I changed pages it would freeze.

To me it appeared that much of Google was off-line, but I could close and re-open the browser and the pages would [sometimes] work, until I changed pages.

At first it looked like an issue with AVG, I had just up-graded to version 9 the week before. I also noticed that AVG had loaded a browser add-on called Safe Search which I wasn't to happy about. So I removed the add-on and things appeared to work in both Firefox and Explorer, but not in Google Chrome.

So I removed the last program that was loaded; Adobe Flash Player. Adobe was upgraded on Dec 25 which is when I started seeing the issue. I assume it was a corrupt install, because I downloaded it again and things still work.

So; Re-install Flash Player if it looks like Javascript is not functioning. Don't bother searching the web, because it appears that thousands of people have the same or similar issues. The only thing you get out of the forums is one post about a program not working and hundreds of follow-up posts of 'me too'.

Removing a Broswer add-on:
Windows Explorer help; select Tools / Internet Options / Programs / Manage add-ons / Disable AVG Safe Search.

I also disabled the add-on Bonjour from Apple.

New Page Generation and Page Views

Figured I would look back over the year and check how a few of the new pages were doing. Most of these relate to Equipment Chassis stuff. There were many other new pages started over this last year, but these all relate to the same topic.

These numbers are really low, but that could just mean the topics will not bring in any traffic. So it might seem nice to generate a new page to bring in some traffic, just don't get your hopes up.

Cable Harness, Aug 16 2009, 220 page views
Equipment Cable Runs, Aug, 11 2009,  385 page views
 Equipment Rack Grounding, July 31 2009, 277 page views
Chassis Cable Retractors, May 21 2009, 145 page views 
Chassis Power Modules,  April 29 2009, 523 page views
Chassis Wire Selection,  April 29 2009, 286 page views
EPIC Express Cards, Jan 6 2009, 72 page views.

The numbers don't look so great, maybe one or two page views a day. The EPIC card has issues with just being new on the market, if there are any products at all.

Oh, so far interfacebus has 4,017,965 page views this year [regardless of these new pages].
SEO recommendation; keep generating new pages. Even if the new pages don't generate many new page views, you still may bring in new site visitors [which may come back].
Graphic; Chassis panel mount push button.

SEO Best Practices and Tips

So first I took a look at the pages that receive the lowest page views. Most of these are new pages, so it's ok that they receive a low amount of views. However some pages are much older but still receive no page views;

This one is a new page generated in October, still no Pagerank and just 11 page views?
PWB Types. It has an internal link and two external links, one from the sitemap, and one from the 'Whats new blog' Definition of PWB Terms. There is little else I can do but wait either for more page views or maybe a Pagerank.

This next page is more than a  year old about Operating Temperature of a 2N2906 transistor. Looks like it was just updated last month [not that I recall]. Again no page-rank but it has multiple internal links and at least one external link. The point is that you can't make people visit your page, no matter how much work you put into it. I assume the pagerank went to zero because Google knows no one ever views the page. Or the text is to similar to another page on my site.

Along the same lines, I'll also check the number of incoming External links; this related page only has 3 external links: Derating an NPN Transistor. This particular page has a ranking of one, again more than a year old. Yet one more; no page rank and only 33 page views [Derate a 2N3765].

I spent a ton of time generating these derating pages and they never generated any traffic.

So what can you do to get a page working. First I just updated two of the pages. Second, I added a new external link to the pages via this blog posting. Finally I generated a new way to find the pages via the text on this page, or via the graphic I attached here. Oh you may have missed it but I also linked to an internal page of the other blog, that way those pages just don't go to a zero page rank after a few months.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that by adding an external link to a page and increasing the pagerank of that page, any page it may link to also sees an increase in pagerank. This last page already has a page rank of two, but only two incoming links. Quick Connect Resistor, now it has 3 links and is associated with the term "Quick Connect". In fact each of these links now associate the page(s) with a new term.

Graphic; Chip resistor, Thermistor, Derating Curve.

Why do I need an XML Sitemap

I really don't know why I need an XML site map for the search engines, but I just generated one. The last sitemap I generated was just about a year ago; the file was always left out on my server. In fact Google would come out and read the sitemap a few times a month.

Any way the XML site map differs from the html sitemap I generated yesterday; the HTML file is for people, while the XML file is for the search engines.

Just like last year I used GSiteCrawer. The program had crashed several months ago and I finally got around to taking a look at it, turns out I just downloaded it again to get it to work.

So the point is why do I need this file? The thing is the file size is 291k bytes and just burns up bandwidth off my server.

As indicated in the 'New Engineering Pages' blog a new page covering Feed-Through Capacitors was added [to interfacebus.com] at 7 PM last night. When I check at 5 AM today, the page had already been indexed by Google. In fact doing a search for that term returns my page at 49 out of 473,000 results. err, I didn't need a site-map to get a new page indexed hours after I wrote it ....

Whatever; Google indicates that 1,607 URLs were submitted [via the XML file] of which 1,481 URLs [pages] are indexed in their results. Now this differs a bit from the copy it replaced which showed 1,859 pages submitted and 1,328 pages indexed ? My computer also indicate more than 1,600 pages.

Anyhow this week I generated a new human readable sitemap and a new machine readable sitemap ~ that's a good thing.

I don't get it, but I would recommend you generate an XML sitemap for your site [if it's a tad large], many of the generators are free to use or download. You don't even have to tell Google, just add a bit of text to your robots.txt file which all the search engines read. My robots text file is blank right now, but only because I didn't want the other search engines downloading a year old file. But the command is: http://www.YOU.com/sitemap.xml ~ a line of text showing the location of the xml file.

I need a few lines of SEO link building:
2N2904 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N2906 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N6760 Derating Curve. Feild Effect Transistor

The graphic above is a test circuit for testing saturated switching time of a transistor.

Site Map

I ran Xenu last night to generate a new sitemap. The file size stated at better than 1.5 Meg and after many hours of work deleting many duplicate entries the size is dropped below 1Meg. I'm hoping to get it uploaded tonight, which would go well with this posting.

Of course I was doing other things as well; I added a few words to the Knol on Solid State Drives. Of course I added to the blog ~ with this posting. I also updated a few pages, which is normal;
RF Component vendors.
RF Power Divider vendors.
RF Phase Shifters, and so on just to name a few.
Google was telling me that the Phase Shifter page had a short meta description, so I updated a few RF pages.

Graphic; Google Analytics / Map Overlay / Continent view.
Oh the map shows visits, but there have been 3,950,080 page-views so far this year.

Copyright Issues yet again

Google keeps coming out with new tools and so on. Using these new options I found two more web sites that were coping my data. I emailed the first website last week, and the data has already been removed. I only just e-mailed the second site today and I have yet to hear back. A third site appeared to be using data from interfacebus, but the screen showed 'Domain gone' or what ever.

With all the computers Google uses they already know [I would assume] when a page has been copied. I've never seen a 'copied' page appear above mine in the Search Engine Pages [SEPs]. So in some way it really doesn't benefit a person coping the data, because you will always appear lower down the page. But I guess, if you have nothing to say [or write] than a copied page bets out a blank page.Anyway I have a few pages that need a bit of help;
Battery Control ICs.
Voltage Controlled Regulator ICs.
Charge Pump ICs.

The chart [Web Statistics] was first posted November 8th and 2009 PageViews were looking a tad low. Now this year is only lagging by 4000 pageviews from 2007 ~ with 15 days to go. So this year will be the highest year ever. I estimate over a 100,000 yet to hit the site. Oh, the site receives much more than 4000 pageviews a day.

Google Knol

Figured I would take a look at how Knol was doing these days.
Looks like about 2,012 visits from 102 countries over the last 3 months. Unfortunately I only added a counter just about 3 months a go. However Knol indicates about 20,922 page views so far, after about a year and a half. The important metric to me is the number of people that get sent over to interfacebus; only 738 people this year.

The knol with the largest pageviews relates to computer buses [IEEE1284 to name just one]. The second highest visited page covers the RS232 bus, while the third page covers the SD Card. The most recent page under development covers Temperature Derating.

Any of the Knols can be reached from this page; Computer Buses. Which by the way showed up one listing above a link from interfacebus.com.
Graphic' Knol page-views for the last thirty days.

How to get more external page links

This sort of follows yesterdays post on page-views. This time the topic is on external page links. An external link is a site other than interfacebus that links to a particular page.

A page with low external pages linking in will receive a low page rank, and so will receive a lower amount of visits. So this is a list of a few pages with only one external page link, and that also has a page rank of zero [in most cases]. In most if not all cases the only external link pointing to the site would be the sitemap for this website.
Definition of Antenna Terms. ['P']
Definition of Radar Terms.
Engineering Acronyms. [He]
Dictionary of Terms.
Capacitor Terms.
VXI Board Manufacturers.
Data Highway.
And on and on it goes. I'm not sure why so many pages now have only one external link. I'll need to keep watching this issue.

So by listing a few of these pages here, they receive another incoming external link. Maybe some day they may even also receive a page rank. Of course if they do get a page rank than they may pass some of that page rank to another page that they point to.

The graphic is Visits from Denmark, so far this year [because of the Global Warming meeting].

Comparing Pageviews

Back in October I blogged about the number of pages receiving some amount of page views. Here's the update compared to that last post.

140,000 to 149,999: 1 page
110,000 to 139,999: 0 page
100,000 to 109,000: 1 page
90,000 to 99,999: 0 pages
80,000 to 89,999: 1 page
70,000 to 79,999: 0 pages
60,000 to 69,999: 1 page
50,000 to 59,999: 0 pages
40,000 to 49,999: 4 pages
30,000 to 39,999: 3 pages
20,000 to 29,999: 14 pages
10,000 to 19,999: 59 pages
1,000 to 9,999: 509 pages
100 to 999: 849 pages
1 to 99: 400 pages [estimate]


I don't see any thing that pops off the page. The increase in pageviews below 100 increased, but that would be due to new page additions. I don't recall adding 50 new pages, but that is the only section that is hard to count [so it's an estimate]. 


Still 350 pages that only received less than 100 hits for a year is a lot; more than 50 will top the 100 mark by the end of the year. Another 50 or so of the new pages should top 100 by next year end, so that still leaves 300 pages that will never see more than 100 page views a year?


Sections that come to mind; [that will never see more than 100 hits]

Index of Manufacturers [this particular page received 49 page views]. Number of effected pages; 30+

FET Derating Curve [this particular page received 46 page views]. Number of effected pages;15+
Interface Buses Index  [this particular page received 46 page views]. Number of effected pages;12
MIL-STD-100  [this particular page received 45 page views]. Number of effected pages;7
Transistor Derating Curves  [this particular page received 31 page views]. Number of effected pages;20+


So that was another 100 or so, maybe another 100 that are single page additions ~ which leaves 100 pages unaccounted for. So no matter what I do some number of pages will never see any hits, but I don't know that when I generate them.

URL Appraisal Results for interfacebus.com

I was just out checking on a unrelated web site on the internet, just to see what was up with it. One of the search results was from a page that does URI appraisals, or internet name value. I just had to plug in my name, the other site showed a value of $7,000.

Their appraisal indicated a Site Worth of $51,049.40 [calculated to the penny?]
Domain Created Date: 2000-10-04
Domain Age: 9 Years, 64 Days
Google PageRank: 5
Overall Site Ranking: 122,669
Unique Monthly Visitor Estimate: 13,923
Alexa Ranking: 161,376
Google Inlinks: 0 [looks like it returned zero results]
Google Pages: 1,850
Yahoo Inlinks: 9,992
Yahoo Pages: 2,180
Marketability; 
.... Top Level Domain: GREAT 
.... Undesirable Characters: GREAT (0 Total) 
.... Overall Length: OK (12 Length)

The Alexa data looked lower then normal [lower is better] so I went out and checked them too. The pic file is Daily Reach; the lower the number the better. The other number provided by Alexa is Traffic Rank, also the lower the better. Traffic Rank was the number given above by the other site.
7 Day 133,441 [-19,546]
1 Month 133,698 [-61,749]
3 Month 159,448 [-34,218]
Oh that appraisal value is only for the web name, not the money it could earn.

Increasing Web Visits

Starting last month the number of visits to interfacebus started to exceed 9,000 per day. Ten of the 21 week days saw numbers over 9,000 visits. In fact, not counting this month, all of the highest numbers for any given day occurred last month. Most of the numbers centered around 9,300 or so.

The numbers for this month are already around 9,700 or four to five hundred visits higher than the highest day last month.

Here's a new way to look at the numbers, to compare month to month over the last few years. Over the last few months the number of visits have been increasing. Like any other posting I can't really tell what pages are seeing an increase, only because there's just to many different pages.

Visits from Sub-Continent Regions

I'm still wondering why visits over the week end came in at normal numbers. Both Saturday and Sunday numbers were right on the mark at 8,900 visits. The attached chart shows those two day numbers.
Friday visits were down by about 2,000, and Thursday was down another 3,000, so why isn't the weekend missing any visitors?

I checked the prior weekend and the numbers appear almost identical to the one shown in the graph. Outside of the US, India sent in 610 visits, the United Kingdom sent 479, and Canada sent in 446 to name the top three countries.
Graphic; Google Analytics, Map Overlay, Sub Continent Region, Visits.

Holidays and Technical Websites

The site interfacebus always takes a hit on holidays, who goes out to look up electronics stuff on their day off.
The chart is web visits so far this year, on a weekly basis. Over the last three months there's been slow but growing increase in sites visitors over last year. The last data point, for the week ending yesterday showed a 21% increase over last year. The week before that had a 16% increase in site visits.

The decrease in visits last week, for both years, was due to the holiday. Saturday received a normal 4500 visits, which is a bit strange. But Thursday was down 33% and Friday was only down about 1400 visits. The site will exceed last years November numbers, but its still iffy if it will exceed last months numbers.
2,039,975 visits so far
3,718,243 page views so far.

Pageviews still on the Increase

With the up-coming holiday I assumed that interfacebus would start seeing a decrease in site visits. However that has yet to occur, at least that I can tell. Yesterday was the second highest Tuesday on record, with 9,221 visits. Of course I'll see a decrease the day of the holiday, but because the web is world wide the decrease won't be total. In the early hours eastern Europe will be showing up, followed by South America and Canada, and then Western Europe ~ or something like that. As the chart shows the site just past 2 million visits to date for the year.

All the bad links were fixed from the site-wide check the other day, nothing but routine updates occurring now. There is a slow html enhancement being made to the Dictionary and Acronyms pages, but that will go on for weeks. In a few cases the page might visibly change but not by much.

I did notice that the main Transistor Derating page lost its page rank, not really sure what happened there. A few of those pages were also just updated [2N3441], but they still get almost no incoming visits. Guess everyone already knows how to derate a transistor, or I pick transistors nobody uses.

Graphic; Google Analytics / Map Overview / Countries/Territories 2009.

Proprietary Embedded Board Formats

I just happened to be checking a few of the COTS Board Manufacturer pages today. I noticed that the few pages I picked to update, at random, were receiving almost no incoming visits. It only took a few minutes before I realized that the three board formats I had updated were all proprietary standards. Really proprietary board formats, because I don't know that any board standard was ever released ~ other than a detailed data sheet so the board could be designed into an embedded system.

So I opened the STX Board Format page to do a routine update, or just to check to see it was up-to-date. Anyway I also opened site analytics to see how the page was doing for visits. That  board format receives almost no visitors, then I started to wonder why that was. That's when I noticed that the format was proprietary in nature.

There really is no reason for someone to visit my site for a board format that is only produced by one or two individual companies, unless they don't realize the standard is proprietary. So I can understand why the incoming visits to that page are so low. However; on the positive side, by listing the standard on the site the information is there to review if it ever comes up in conversation. That is, I don't have to claim ignorance, within minutes I know what the STX board is just by pulling up the page.

I figured I would then check a few other proprietary board standards, like E2Brain. Same story with this industrial format, except that this page received even lower page views by 30%. I pulled up the PISA board standard next. Now to my surprise the PISA format was getting 3x the page views even though I figured this format was obsolete. The PISA slot format is based on a modified PCAT slot connector, which by definition implies obsolesce because the industry moved onto PCI many years ago.

I don't have a point here, other then to indicate that some pages will never do well on the web, but they still deserve a place on interfacebus to insure the topic is covered; Industrial Embedded Board Formats.
I did make sure that the page clearly indicated that the board formats were proprietary......

Graphic; Single Board Computer [SBC]. Public Domain.

Google Page Ranking

Not really sure how many other times I've posted about Page Ranking issues, but I'm always amazed when I come across one of my pages with a zero page ranking. Now sometimes a page does regain a page rank, I just rechecked two links from the Aug posting.
However in other cases the ranking remains at zero. From the April posting, which only related to the section on Equipment Manufacturers;  the 'Ae' Electronic Vendors listing remains at zero months later, and I'll bet it had been there long before that. Also nothing for the 'Asq' Electronic Vendors, the 'B' Equipment Vendors, 'Cm' Equipment Manufacturers, 'Dem' Manufacturers, and the 'Fm' Component Manufacturers page. I'm sure there are many others in this section with no ranking. Note [below] that the blog posting in 6/08 was basically the same posting as 4/09.

Another section that always has a lot of no-ranked pages is the Recommendations for Derating a Transistor. For example the 2N3250 Derating Guide, the 2N4150 Derating Guide, or the 2N6691 Derating Guide all are at zero and they have been on the web for over a year.

Yet another section that always has issues with ranking are the Technical Terms section. Just to list a few; 'Tr' Definitions, the 'Rec' Terms, and 'Op' Technical Terms. There are many other pages as well, these are but a few. But as the web master I have no control over how a page gets ranked.

So I updated these pages again as they required it, but there is little else I can do. The equipment manufacturers have existed for over three years, the engineering dictionary for over two years and the Derating guidelines for over a year.......

Previous Blog posting;
No Google Page Ranking. Aug 19 2009
Zero Google Page Ranl for Component Vendors. Apr 22 2009
Page Rank & Listing of Manufacturers. June 8 2008

The graphic is the site logo for interfacebus.

Xenu Report, Statistics for Managers

I ran Xenu on interfacebus over the last hour. I run it on the off hours to keep my server happy, or at times when I expect low site visits. Normally I check for bad links every three months or so, but it eats up server bandwidth so not more than that. Plus the error rate is only 0.6% and most of those will turn up good later today.

Forbidden Request;
This just means when my spider hit the site, they return a no robots message. But I checked them and they all work. 
The resource is no longer available;
Yahoo Geocities closed down this year and I had one link off the Engineering Dictionaries page. I removed the link and reloaded the page.
Timeout;
Their server is slow; 3 out of the 5 sites are working now.
Temporarily  Overloaded;
Another slow server; three of the 4 sites are working.
Server Error;
I don't know what this means, two of the 3 sites are working.
No Object Data;
That's from Kaparel. First guess is he no longer exists...

The rest will not be rechecked today. After years of doing this I've learned not to wast my time checking and re-checking the same site. I'll give them a few days to come back on the web. However three of the 'Not Found' issues is from one of my pages which will be fixed today. It does appear that one of the 'Not Found' links on the VHDL Counter page is gone, if he doesn't come back in a few hours it will be deleted.

So of the 65 issues, 25 are good. Leaving 45 potentially bad sites out of 6885 doesn't sound so bad. Remember, most or all of those sites could pop back up later today as their server comes back online.
The other side of that is many of these companies reside on more than one page; for example a vendor might be listed with Battery Manufacturers, but also on the OEM vendor listing. Or maybe a company manufacturers SSTL ICs and LVTTL parts.....

Anyway the site appears healthy; also, the highest number of visits for a M, T, W, or R occurred this month. Not sure why Friday is lagging and I'm not really tracking the week ends.
Graphic; Xenu report summary. Click for a larger image.

Google Analytics Recomended

I've been using Google Analytics since mid 2006 on a daily basis and I recommend the program 100%. Google Analytics tracks traffic statistics for interfacebus. I like the software not only because it tracks my site stats, or because the software is free, but because of the different reports Analytics provides. Many of the screen shots used in these blog postings are right out of a Google Analytics report.

So Analytics has a new report [beta] called Intelligence which provides 'Alerts', the green bars. These alerts which would open below that graphic once one of the bars are clicked. Looks like the number of alerts vary by day and they may also be either positive or negative. For example on Nov. 5:
Time on Site; people spent 88% more time on the USB Interface page then normal...
Pageviews; the number of page views for the AWG page were 15% below average.....
Visits; The number of visitors from Canada down 19% and California 11% below average.
For each of these data points there's an expected range so you don't get an alert because page views varied by a few hits.

This data was always there, but never on one page or in the same report. Not sure what to do if hits from California fall, seems like that is out of my control.
I recommend using Google Analytics..
Graphic; Google Analytics, Daily Alerts, November. Click for a larger image.

What Constitutes Good Content

Not much going on with the web site, a lot of page updates and three new pages. Normally when a page gets updated it's just a minor change. Maybe a paragraph but more often it might just be defining an acronym.

Any how the site is still doing well. Yesterday was the best Monday ever for sites visits, and it had 30 more visits than last Monday which happened to be the previous best Monday ever.... The best Tuesday ever was just two weeks ago.

So the question is why are the hits increasing and how do I know which pages to work on. Analytics feeds me a ton of data but many times it's hard to know what to do with the data. Sometimes I'll update a page based on a low number of visits, but maybe a page receives no visits because their is no interest in the topic. Maybe the page content is to small to bring in any visitors, Who can say ?

I'm looking at three pages relating to HTML coding; one page had 64 hits, one had 167 hits and one had 4,000 hits this year. For the year, each of the pages did better this year than last; however there was a 22% drop during October. In any case the site has only had six different weeks this year that did not out perform last year. The current data over the last several weeks indicate this year the site is receiving about 15% more visitors over last year. Yet again, another data point only shows a 0.34% increase in page views for the entire year [+12,000 pageviews].
Graphic; Google Analytics. Blue is this year.

Web Statistics

The incoming numbers still look good for the web site this month. They seem to be about the same as they were for last month, so this month should almost be as high as last month, but the holiday will drop the total down several thousand visits.

The graph is for Page Views per year for the last 5 years. However there are two notes; first the first 3 months of 2005 had no data so the fourth month was used to back-fill the data. Second, 2009 does not include numbers for Nov or Dec of this year.

The peaks are hovering around 2,300,000 page views per year. The current data indicates this year will show around 2,500,000 page views. That's based on a current number of 2,061,643 page views, plus 223,689 from last month and 172,882 visits from last Dec.

Other than that, just normal web page house-keeping is getting done over the last few days. Oh I did notice that the AWG Table for Wire Gauge Size and Current Capacity showed two different 2,000 view dips lasting for three weeks each this year. Not really sure what happened to the AWG page, but it appears to be an issues with Google Analytics?

Chart; data from AWSTATS, produced by OpenOffice.

Feed Burner Stats

Seems Feedburner is doing ok, or at least its bringing in a few visitors to the blog. It would appear that the people who are visiting the blog are finding it via one of my animated headlines I placed on several of the web pages; however most of the clicks are coming in from Desktop email clients and desktop feed readers and I'm not sure if there is an animated headliner in the blog feed...

So far the headline animator for this blog has been viewed 1,488 times and clicked 18 times to bring new people into the blog. This blog has then sent 89 visitors over to interfacebus.com over the same time frame. Every little bit helps, I'm always looking to get new visitors to the site.

Highest Month for Visitors

So this month saw the highest amount of visitors to the web site. There were 160,384 unique visitors and a total of 219,826 visits. From those hits there were a total of 339,286 pages views [note these numbers don't include today]. Although it might be a bit hard to tell this month is higher than March at 159,517 but again, not counting today. Better yet, October is not normally a 'high' month. Click the pic for a larger image.


Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 100,000 [on the chart] but really equates to 10GB as the numbers were changed to fit the graph.

Unique Visits:
Are visits from a computer within a month, but any one computer is only counted one time. If any one computer returns for a second visit it's counted by the Visits curve.

Visits:
A site visit is registered each time a person visits the site within a month and each time the person returns to the site. Site Visits should always be equal to or greater than Unique Visits.

Page Views:
Are the number of pages a person views per month, regardless of how many times the visitor returns to the web site. Page Views should always be equal to or greater than Site Visits. Page views are really the only data point that is falling. Page Views is related to Bounce Rate, which is the percentage a person visits one page and then leaves the site.

I've changed the chart a bit for this month, now the legend and title are placed inside the graph. Placing the legend inside the graph allows the chart to grow in size while leaving the pic size about the same, although I did increase the overall size of the picture a bit.

The bottom trend line for bandwidth has no relationship to the other lines on the chart. The bandwidth line [light blue] does not show visitor data, but the amount of server bandwidth used during the month, while all the other data represent visits or page views. Basically the 100,000 'y' axis represents 10GB of server bandwidth and the 150,000 make would be 15G Bytes. So in this one case, I want these numbers to be low. The more they fall below the 'Unique visits' line [just above] the better it is for the site.

OpenOffice Suite

I downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice last night; the current version was 3.01 and now the new version is 3.1.1. I also noted that a newer version is due out in December and I saw a mention of the Ubuntu operating system and that it will also ship with a version of OpenOffice. Recall that I just requested a free Ubuntu CD which should be arriving in a month or so.

Some of the charts used in this blog are generated by OpenOffice; as in Web Visits and Seasonal Fluctuations.

BTW; OpenOffice is free and has been downloaded over 200,000 times a day and well over 3,000,000 times this year. I stopped using MS Office for home use a few years ago, I think I had the XP version.

Other free Office packages.
Graphic; B-2 Spirit bomber aircraft.

What is the Android Operating System

Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Android was started by Google, but it's open source now. Seems like it's primarily only on mobile phones right now but I bet that will change next year. Looks like there are a number of phones about to come out using or based on Android. Once the people making phones see a reduction of ~ $40 a phone because the OS is free, other mobile devices should start jumping on board. Why not, reduce your products cost by $40 or make another $40 in profit, plus it appears Windows mobile has a low user rating [or so I find on the internet].

Although the graph shows 2009 data, hits from Android started coming in last November, with 11 visits for the month. Visits have ramped up over the last year to 38 visits for last month [87% of which were new visitors], according to Google Analytics.

The server side counter [AWSTATS] does not report any hits from Android. However it might just be lumping Android visits under its "GNU Linux category [there are 7 other Linux based operating systems listed in the report].
Here are the different versions of Android coming in [2009]
Version 1.0 = 7%
Version 1.1 = 26%
Version 1.5 = 58%
Version 1.6 = 8%

Now it wasn't but a few years ago that search engines were telling web masters that they had to reformat their sites to allow them to work on mobile devices. Now, the un-formated sites seem to work just fine on those new devices, so I'm kind of glad I didn't spend three man years building another site just to find out later it wasn't needed.

Side topic; So far this month there are 138,782 unique visitors; higher than Jun, Jul and Aug.
By the end of the day there should be around 146,000 visitors, pushing it above Jan, Feb, Apr, and May.
Wednesday will pull in another 8,000 plus visitors. This month may bring in the highest amount of visitors this year.

Graph is produced from Google Analytics data.

AVG Anti Virus Scanner

I down loaded the newest version of AVG Anti-Virus software yesterday. I went from version 8.5 to version 9.0; both were free versions of the software.

The first thing I did was disable AVG LinkScanner. The LinkScanner routine pre-checks all the sites that come up in a search engine results page. A lot of web masters dislike AVG's LinkScanner because it sends unwanted traffic to their web sites. Each time a web address shows up in a search engine, AVG down loads the page and checks it for viruses. Well that could end up being a lot of bandwidth for a web site if they keep showing up in the SEP by some one using AVG. The routine brings in no traffic, but downloads the web page regardless.
People using the AVG linkScanner and people still running version 6 of MS Explorer are the biggest grips I've seen from web master's on-line

A few hours after the install, AVG wants me to reboot again so it can upgrade it self, I guess I can under stand that.

Although I have not yet run a scan, I set the program to do a slow scan. The default scan speed was 'automatic', with a higher setting called 'fast scan'. Maybe this will not slow down my computer so much...

Ok, I just started a virus scan, looks like it reset to 'automatic', but it doesn't matter the scan only took thirteen minutes, down from 50 minutes on the older version. That seems odd, I wouldn't have figured on that kind of increase in speed ~ but I wasn't using the PC.

I also just reduced MS Explorer web page disk space from 10MB to 7M Bytes, but I left the history at 7 days. That 7meg storage space still a lot of web pages. I didn't see how to do that in Google Chrome. I reduced Firefox to 7 days as well and I didn't see how to reduce the cache size either. Reducing the cache is just another way to speed up the virus scan, less files on the hard drive.

Review of AVG Anti-Virus Software, version 9.0: I recommend it [so far].
Graphic; B2 bomber taking out those viruses.

Incoming visitors from Forums

I was just checking Google Analytics data on Referring Sites, or sites that send visitors to interfacebus.com [not the home page]. I noticed that I get many more incoming visitors from on-line forums then I do News Groups. I always figured the News Groups sent in a lot of traffic because every other day someone posts a link to me in one of the threads. Now I realize that when I search Google News Groups, that they post forum links as well. News groups have been on the decline for a decade any way, once the web turned into what it is now.

The chart shows 34,262 visits from 529 different sources [forums]. The news groups only sent in 1,921 visitors during the same period. This year forum traffic accounted for 10,948 visits. Now none of that traffic is from me, I don't post in forums. But it is a nice way to get some free advertising, and they may end up coming back again because about 70% are new visitors to the site [really 80%]. Better yet those posting stay out there forever, so once someone links to me I still might get a hit years later.

Related Posts;
Referring Sites; 6/13/08
Referring Sites; 5/3/08
Why do I need backlinks; 3/14/08
Graphic; Referring Sites, filtered for "Forum", per week.

How to get a high Search Engine Postion

Search Engine Position [SEP] is the term used to describe where in a search engine listing a web address [web site] shows up. A good SEP would be ending up on the first page of results returned from a search. Of course showing up in position number one would be the best out-come.

A lot of web sites pay companies called SEO's [for Search Engine Optimization] to help the ranks or position in the search engines. But many times SEO's are employed by people that don't really under stand how search engines work, course their trying to run a business and might not have time to investigate the issue.

Well in most cases I think about those issues while generating a new page, and I try to account for many of the issues. However because page optimization [SEO tactics] doesn't help the viewer I don't always perform all the optimizations possible. As time goes on additional page optimizing is added, maybe the next time the page gets up-dated.

So any way I added a new page yesterday covering the Single Wire Debug Bus, and I linked to it from one of the Interface buses listing pages.  I also blogged about the new page in the new engineering pages blog.

I was out in Google searching for data on the Single Wire Debug Bus because I never really started writing the page yet. Guess what, using the search terms "Single Wire Debug" that new page I generated yesterday shows up on the first page of the results and is the 6th listing on the page [out off 136,000 pages]... That's pretty good.

Graphic; NASA rocket maximum payload comparison.

No Issues with the web Site

No really, but I took care of many of the updates I wanted to get done, plus I hit a ton of other pages.

If I had a free cartoon of a balloon boy I'd post it, but I don't.

I updated 50 pages today, 19 pages yesterday, 26 on Wednesday and 36 pages on Tuesday. Most were HTML updates which can not be seen by a visitor, but enhance the page regardless.

Hmm, so far this month I have 120,903 visitors, say 8,700 per working days and 4,300 on the week ends gets me to about 185,000 unique visitors. That would be about 30,000 above the next highest month.

Free Ubuntu Download or CD Shipment

I requested a 'free' CD for version 9.10 of Ubuntu today. I'm not sure why I had to sign in and register, but it was some what painless. Once you sign in with an e-mail address, you have to follow a link to continue the process. I guess the first set is confirming you gave a real address.

The web site indicates that it will take 6 to 10 weeks for the CD to arrive, shipping is free as well.

Last week I read an article about on-line banking which mentioned Ubuntu. Basically their point was that the safest way to access your on-line bank was to use a Ubuntu OS operating from a CD [from a fresh re-boot].
Now this week I see another on-line article relating to IBM and it's suite of programs with Ubuntu [or Red Hat].
So maybe it time to give this thing a try, I have plenty of hard drive space.......

This will be my first attempt using Linux-based Operating System [OS]. I first looked into about ten years ago as an alternative to Windows, but it seemed a bit difficult to install so I never bothered. Back then there was no install program for Linux, and you had to install dozens of files to load the OS up. These days the install process is just like installing any other application, just run the install program [I hope].

I'm over those days of caring what new colorful feature an OS has, I only use it to run this web site and that's it.
On power-up I have Windows Vista open MS IE, Google Opera, Firefox and an old HTML editing program called 1st Page. After that I may open an out-dated graphics editor [PhotoImpact] or Open Office if I need to modify a pic file or do some office related task. Other than that I don't care what OS I'm running because I'm never in it, as I'm changing my website with the HTML editor and verifying the changes with one of the browsers. Oh except for the graphic editor all the other programs mentioned are free.
Guess I'll comment again in about 10 weeks......

Ubuntu; A commercially sponsored Debian-derived Linux distribution that focuses on usability.

Graphic; Google Analytics Map Overlay, Sub Continent Regions, this year.

WebSite Server Issues

So the server that hosts interfacebus.com went down today for about an hour. It wouldn't be the first time the server went off line, but it seems like it has been awhile but then again I don't track it.

I was trying to use the website when it crashed, but I found something else to do, but what really gets me is the loss of hits or visits I'll see for today. You can't tell from the graph but when it went off-line at 10am which stopped incoming traffic during the highest performing hour of the day, and it was down for more than an hour.

Whatever, yesterday had 8,997 visitors which is just slightly less than last Tuesday with 9,042. From the chart, Wednesday normally pulls in the most visitors during week, so I was expecting today to exceed yesterdays numbers and pull in more than last week which was the best day of the year. Oh, click the graphic for a larger view.

So, I'll see what the numbers are sometime early tomorrow, but I'm already waiting for next weeks numbers?

Text from my server; We guarantee that all of our servers will exceed 99.9% Up-time.

Copyright Issues again

I was updating one of my pages a few days ago and I found a few entries that lack a bit of detail relating to the page they were on. So I was in the process of visiting those pages to get more detail regarding their listed products as they related to the topic I was updating, and of course checking to insure the company still produced that line of product. It's web site enhancement, site updates and quality control all with the same check; remember companies close product lines all the time..

I wasn't going to bring this up, but I don't really have any 'other' new issues to blog about.

So I'm checking out this companies web site, looking for data to enhance the listing I have for him on the page that's being up-dated. Of course we all know what's about to happen, right?
I come across a page containing data taken from my web site. Not good, but I had to read it a few times, I know it came from me but was a bit unsure how much of the data was lifted off my pages. It didn't take long after I pulled up the page the info came from, as the text was lifted verbatim, before I saw that much of a page was copied. Now I know how I write even if I don't remember what I write only because that section was written several years ago, but the give away was that although that page has been updated a number of times the section that was copied was historical, so I know it was never updated.

The companies web site only had a contact email for 'sales', while I assumed the web master garbed the data anyway, so I didn't even attempt to send an email. 

Well I deleted his contact info from my site, but not for the reasons you might think. Normally Google already knows the site has copied the text, cause they track that data. That site would never show up higher then me for any search relating to that same text . I removed his contact info because I linked to that company from twelve different pages on my site.
I was passing my page rank from my site to his, or reducing my own page rank, so his site would get a higher page rank. In Google's eyes, by linking to him, my site was voting for his site indicating I approved of his site. Well I don't approve of his site, and I'm not going to degrade my site, by passing away my page rank, while linking to him.

So his home page has a Google Page Rank of three [today], but he just lost twelve external page links that had page ranks of 3 and 4. It will take Google another month or more to spider the pages that just had those links removed, so it will be mid December before it stores my page updates and then January before the SEPs [Search Engine Pages] are updated. Remember, it doesn't matter if I sent him any visitors, I was telling Google I approve of his site...... Or it could be February before he sees a reduction in rankings.
Hmm, I have a label for copyright issues, must be occurring to much........

Graphic; Evolution of the Ares I Rocket [copyright free].

Top Content and Page Views

I took a quick look at how the page views for the site were coming in.
The data shows the number of pages that get some amount of visits so far this year
Page views for 1/1/09 to 10/18/09

110,000 to 119,000: 1 page
100,000 to 109,000: 0 pages
90,000 to 99,000: 0 pages
80,000 to 89,000: 1 page
70,000 to 79,000: 0 pages
60,000 to 69,000: 2 pages
50,000 to 59,000: 1 page
40,000 to 49,000: 0 page
30,000 to 39,000: 4 pages
20,000 to 29,000: 10 pages
10,000 to 19,000: 50 pages
1,000 to 9,000: 458 pages
100 to 900: 869 pages
1 to 99: 350 pages [estimate]
So far there has been 1,401,430 unique visits to interfacebus.

err, ok I already know the under performing pages;
100 pages relating to How to Derate a Transistor.
100 pages relating to Manufacturers alphabetic Listing.
50 new pages, then just pages that only hold a large graphic.

Related Blog Posts.
Top Web Site Content  6/23/09
Top Content and Page Views  4/18/08

Are noon and midnight 12 a.m. or 12 p.m.?
The answer is that the terms 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are wrong and should not be used.
      To illustrate this, consider that "a.m" and "p.m." are abbreviations for "ante meridiem" and "post meridiem." They mean "before noon" and "after noon," respectively. Noon is neither before or after noon; it is simply noon. Therefore, neither the "a.m." nor "p.m." designation is correct. On the other hand, midnight is both 12 hours before noon and 12 hours after noon. Therefore, either 12 a.m. or 12 p.m. could work as a designation for midnight, but both would be ambiguous as to the date intended.

Tell me who visits the site

Engineering companies that visited interfacebus.com this year.
Determined by their Network Location as reported by Google Analytics

The ranking is provided by Google, as are the network names.
The missing ranking's are normal commercial internet providers.
Of course no one company will out perform a large internet provider.
Ranking by # of visitors
23. raytheon company 7,089 visits
34. lockheed martin corporation 5,859 visits
38. northrop grumman corp. 4,778 visits
43. navy network information center (nnic)  4,583 visits
45. 754th electronic systems group 4,470 visits
47. computer sciences corporation 4,183 visits
49. vitro corporation 4,109 visits
50. honeywell international inc. 4,027 visits
51. general electric company 4,010 visits
53. the boeing company 3,930 visits
56. intel corporation 3,850
59. national aeronautics and space administration 3,631 visits
61. l-3 communications corporation 3,568 visits
68. headquarters usaisc 3,366 visits
87. texas instruments 2,412 visits
88. rockwell international corporation 2,395 visits
90. dod network information center 2,296 visits
92. cisco systems inc. 2,260 visits
98. hewlett-packard company 2,200 visits
106. harris corporation 2,064 visits
108. level 3 communications inc. 1,994 visits
122. itt aerospace/communications division 1,800 visits

This data is from 1/1/09 to 10/17/09
Just as an example Raytheon [#23] sent in a consistent average of 180 visits per week.
The ones that got my notice were the military sites which were out performing a number of other companies;
DOD sites: #43, 45, 68, and #90, I had to look up #68 I never heard of them [United States Army Information Systems Command].

Can I do any thing with this data, no but it's interesting to pull up every few years...

Photo credit; US Navy: USS Nimitz.

I'm sending Spam mail to myself

Of the 24 e-mails I've received in the last 5 hours today Google has sent all of them into my spam box, four are from me. Yea, that's right my e-mail address is sending me spam. Ok not really, that's just how insecure email really is. You can make it look like an email comes from any one. For years now I've been reading about how 'they' were going to change things and make email more secure or reliable , but still no action.

Of course I don't read these incoming e-mails that get redirected into the spam folder. After years of using Gmail I haven't seen a mistake yet, well maybe one out of thousands of emails [maybe one a few years ago].  But Google and Gmail is pretty good about catching most if not all spam and directing all of them into my spam folder so I don't have to deal with them.

My other gmail account doesn't even display the spam folder any more. The older account always had [or has] 1000's of spam e-mails in the spam folder at any one time and I couldn't even delete them fast enough. Guess Gmail picked up on that.

So anyway my point is, how many people realize they send out spam mail, or really that somebody else is sending out spam email in their name. Any way; Google knows this trick, so classifies the message as Spam, and advises you that it has come from your address , replacing that by "from me". It guesses that since the message isn't in your Sent Mail display that it's a spoof, and even tells you so!

Any way if you ever get an email from interfacebus it doesn't really mean it came from me.

The graphic is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.

Blog Feedburner Status

Here is another look at how Feedburner for the Blog is doing, and I'm not to sure how this chart differs from the one in the Blog about Feedburner Stats [below]. But it would appear that some where between 50 and 90 people are reading the Feed each day [ignoring the days with zero views].

Now a previous posting talking about blog visits showed a graph with about 60 plus a-day, so I guess Feedburner may be helping [Free Blog Space and SEO Stuff].

Because normal blog visits appear to be remaining about the same, that implies that I'm keeping my visitors to the blog and gaining visitors to the blog feed [I guess]. Referrals to interfacebus from blogspot have not appeared to change. Feed burner also shows a map of visitor locations, but it appears that the only people reading the feed are from the US and Canada.

Related Postings;
Feedburner Stats; 10/5/09.
I'm Burning Feeds Again; 9/28/09.
Graphic: Aggregate Item Use, number of people viewing the feed.

Visitors by Web Browser

Just in case any one is still following the Browser wars. The chart shows the type of browser used by visitors to the web site so far this year. Click the graphic for a larger image. The related links below provide graphs of previous years data. All the data shown here is from Google Analyics for visitors to the interface bus site.


Browser Comparison
       Firefox vs. Internet Explorer
2009 = 34.12% vs. 56.22%
2008 = 30.01% vs. 63.36%
2007 = 25.10% vs. 69.06%
2006 = 20.93% vs. 73.08%

Related Postings.
Is there a Browser War, 6/11/08.
Web Browser Issues, 7/4/06.

You can see from the chart that Google Chrome which just started a year ago is already getting 3% of the traffic or users, winning out over Opera.