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.