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.

Googlebot Crawl Rate

I took a look at how Google's spider was reading my site today. The search engine spider used by Google is called Googlebot. So far this month Googlebot has used up 43MB of bandwidth [as seen by AWSTATS]. Last month Googlebot used 64 MegaBytes of bandwidth via 7327 hits to the server. The attached graphic shows a high of 1,184 hits with an average of 557 hits and a low of 198 hits per day. The website update rate is;
Oct.: 202 page updates
Sep.: 336 pages updates
Aug.; 253 page updates
July; 165 page updates
So it would appear that Google is just barely picking up on the pages that get updated, if only because Googlebot will sometimes reread the same page more than once.

Related Posts;

Googlebot Crawl Stats; Jan 11 2009.
Spider Crawl Stats; Oct 24 2008.
Googlebot Crawl Stats; July 4 2008.
Robot Visits; Sep 14 2007.
Google Crawl Rate; April 14 2007.
Each one of these older posts provides a graphic of the crawl rate.

Yearly High in Unique Visitors

I blogged on Friday about the number of hits or visits coming in because I noticed an increase during a month that normally shows an average amount of visits. The previous day I noted that the incoming visits had amounted to the second largest number of visitors during the year. [Seasonal Fluctuations of Web Visits]

Well yesterday just became the day that received the largest amount of visitors for the entire year. Yesterday ended up with just a tad over 9,000 visitors for the day, or maybe about a hundred over the previous high. Now it's common to see days producing 8,800 visitors, and even more common to see visits in the 8,500 range, but the important point to note here is that the count went over 9,000.

I can't tell why the visitors are increasing; how ever there are a few reasons that come to mind. Perhaps some new page additions just got spidered [found by the search engine], maybe some of the pages added over the last month or so just made it into the Search Engine Pages [SEPs], or maybe some of the page enhancements made over the last month are bringing in new visitors. But really there is just no way to tell why I'm seeing an increase.

Remember it takes time for a search engine to find any changes to your web site. Normally I assume about 15 days before Google finds or reads one of my pages. Another 30 days before a page really starts to show up in the search results [if at all], and another 3 months before that new page receives a Page Rank [if it ever gets a page rank]. However because I post new pages additions out to Blogger [New Engineering Additions], Google really sees the new page address the same day, but I'll bet it does not go out and read it then. Of course Google re-orders their listing every month so maybe I just show up higher in the results now, and has zero to do with any updates....

Graphic; Monthly History AWSTATS: 1/1/09 to 10/13/09

What is wrong with Internet Explorer 8

What the heck is going on with MS Internet Explorer version 8.0.
Most times [but not all] when I right click on a link to either open in a new window or new tab, they open but the page never comes in. So I'm on a site which I want to remain open, right click the link to display in a new tab. Well the tab opens, but I just get the hour glass [for ever]. However the page opens immediately in the original window or by pasting the address into an already open tab, I can get the page to open in any other window.

So what is the deal with MS IE 8 about opening new tabs or windows?

I use three different browsers in two different displays to open up three different sets of web pages, so I still want to use IE even if I have problems with it.

I'm using IE version 8.0.6001.18813
Protected Mode; On
Photo credit; US Army, Stryker hit by a IED in Iraq.

Web Visits and Seasonal Fluctuations

Figured I would produce a different chart then I normally would. Just to show a different view point.

The number of visits coming in this week are some of the highest of the year, but not the highest because a day in March produced the most visitors [so far].

Any way it just doesn't seem like the incoming hits were matching prior trends, so I generated this graph to actually show the high and low trends by month. Yes I know the trend line is flat for the last three years, I'm working on it.

So the best month of the year is in March or sometimes January is a good month. The worst months are at the end of the year in December or mid year around June/July. It just seems odd that if this months hits continue at their present rate that October could be the month with the most visitors this year. Of course I only have a week of data this month, but I looked back over this year and did not find visits per day this high. In fact last month was the highest number of hits in September in the last three years..... There are already a number of older posts that indicate why the visits are flat, so just scroll down the page with the next page link being on the right side.

Data Source; AWSTATS off my server [apposed to Google Analytic data which I also post]. FYI; Google's count would be 3% low because that percentage of visitors do not run Java Script which their counter requires.

SEO Advice; I noticed a few months ago that Google was posting the last revision date of pages as they were displayed in their SEPs. So now regardless of the update I make to a page I rev the text that indicates when the last time the page was updated. In previous up-dates I would only change the date for a major reversion, certainly not for some html change that no one could even see.

ESD Orphan Pages

I was checking a subsection of the site for hits, and I find a page with just one hit or visit this month. I look a little deeper and I couldn't find a page linking to it. I'm sure there is a page linking in, but I couldn't find it. The tracking code is on every page so Analytics will track visitors regardless of any cross links. However; normally zero page visits indicate no possible way of finding the page [really it was one page visit].

The page covered Methods of Static Generation. Which means it just held a table showing the top five ways of generating static electricity and their resulting electrostatic voltage. Looks like that page was just a supplemental page just added to hold the graphic, because it had almost no text at all.

The pages covering ESD terms is a small subsection of the main Engineering Dictionary section, linked off the page covering Engineering Terms, Es. Here are the ESD pages listed by the first term on the page:

Antistatic Property Definition. A to D.
Electric Field Definition. El.
Electrostatic Voltages. El.
Electrostatic Discharge Definition. Es.
Human Body Model Definition. H.
MIL-HDBK-263. Mil Specs.
Static Awareness.
IC ESD Pin Protection.
ESD Wrist Strap. Looks like this has no incoming links.

Photo credit; United States Navy

The issues with ESD on board a metal ship must be reduced a bit......

Knol Reader Status

One more posting on the health of the family of web sites that make up interfacebus. This time I'm reviewing how Google Knol is doing. I only just added Google Analytics to Google Knol a few months ago so visitor data only goes back that far; otherwise I have no tracking data. The graph shows data on a per day basis, and appears some what low but there are only 10 knols out there.

There are about half as many pages on knol as the Google sites webpage, which gets about twice as many visitors. But I like Google Knol because it gives me a separate web site to post articles on. Example Knol; Description of Solid State Drives.

Google Knol only sends four or five referrals over to interfacebus.com on a daily basis.

Previous Postings;

Knol is just not working for me. 7/16/09
Traffic from Google Knol. 10/11/08

Feedburner Stats

So its been seven days now since I started Feedburner. The chart shows the data over the last week. The blue line represents Reach and the green line represents subscribers to the Feed. The numbers are not additive, but are a per day count. The number of Subscribers to the feeds are running around 10 per day. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.  Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

I've added a banner to a number of non-technical pages on the site, some of the faq pages. However the pages that had a banner added to them don't see a lot of visitors so it may be a few more weeks until more people see them. The banner that sees the most page views is the one on this blog.

Referrals from this blog are up 11% over 2007 and bring in around 700 visitors a year to the web site. The percentage of new visitors is 78% with a Bounce rate of 59%.

Free Blog Space & SEO Tactics

I went ahead and took a look at how these blogs are doing, following yesterdays posting about the health of the rest of the web sites. Looks like the visits are down a bit, but that's kind of understandable because I have not been posting that much over the last few months.  The graph combines visits from both blogs, click for a larger image. The large peak at the center of the date range is when I stated the other blog [New Page Additions to interfacebus]

Google Analytics indicate that the blogs send or refer around 250 people a month to interfacebus.com, I would assume most of those referrals are new visitors to the web site. The Bounce Rate or the rate that people only view one page after going to interfacebus.com is around 60%, and they stay for around 3 minutes.
The home page of the blog sends over the most visitors to the website, followed by people visiting the page relating to HDTV, SSTL Logic, and PCB Minimum Annular Ring Definition.

I'm not really sure what the news feeds I just started for the blogs will do to the blog visits. Either more people will see or find the feeds and visit the blogs, or people will just read the blog from the news feed and stop coming to the blog all together.

I still recommend running a blog, see 'why blog' below. In addition to the ten reasons listed in that posting it also gives me a chance to list web page address's here providing those pages with an external link.

Related posting's about blogging;

Start a blog to gain Site Visitors. 6/26/09
Blog Traffic. 5/15/08
Why Blog. 9/12/07
Blog Hits. 7/10/07

Web Site Health

I just spent some time looking over just how each of the web sites are doing, and they appear to be doing ok.

Yesterday I posted a graphic showing the increasing hits to the google sites location I run. There's  no doubt that the incoming hits are low, but they are on the increase and we're only talking about a dozen pages.

The analytic data for serialphy also shows a slight increase over the last year. However that site has triple the amount of pages but is only receiving a third amount of the visitors. I just updated a few of its pages with a bit more data.

Google analytics is also reporting an increase in visitors to the knols I've written, again there are only ten and only fifty people visited them yesterday. Five people were referred to interfacebus from knols yesterday.

The important site is interfacebus.com but the amount of visitors this year is flat at around 43,000 visitors a week +/- 5,000. The attached graphic indicates the analytic data for interfacebus, as complied from AWSTATS.

I didn't really check the data for the blog, but it appears to be flat as well. Interest in the blog feed is slowly increasing

Google Sites Advantage

The web site I run out on Google Sites seems to be doing better, at least for now [really sites.google].
Of course my site is called interfacebus, but it's under their domain string [sites.google/site/interfacebus]. But so what, it's free hosting, free website .... its free. The graphic is visits/week for Google Sites, click for a larger image.

Google sites replaced their old 'Google pages' which has closed down [mostly]. I ported the pages I had stored on the Google pages server over to Google Sites, and over the last several months added a few additional pages. The new page hosting plan is much better than the old one, however I did lose page ranking when I made the transfer. Right, the new site means new pages on the web, so page ranking takes awhile. However; the few pages I just checked do have a page rank from Google, but not the home page.

Sentence removed by editor. The first site map listed is pretty large so I'm glad it's taking up server bandwidth on some other server. Better yet hosting the site map on an external server means that I have an external site that points to every one of my pages ~ that's a good thing. Plus all the original pages they host for me also have a few links to different pages on my main site.

Now Google sites has only sent over 511 visitors to interfacebus.com over the last year which is really low. So interfacebus.com is not making any real money from that site. However; Google sites pages have received 9,389 page views over the same period, and because you can also run ads on their hosting service, I'm still making money [off that site], but I'd bet it wouldn't pay for lunch.