interfacebus

Should I combine pages to consolidate information

2011-07-24T09:37:00.005-04:00

In the last few day I've been removing a few pages from the site. Well I remove pages all the time, but in this case I've been combining pages. The thought is, take a page that gets almost no incoming visitors and combine it with a related page, that may also not receive many hits producing a page that may get more hits because it twice as large. Perhaps not twice as large, because any duplicate information would have to be removed.

Removing a page means one less pages that have to be maintained. However it also means one less page that may bring in a visitor. The opposite view would be, one less page that competes with an existing page.

Pages on the site are not introduced based on the amount of traffic they may generate. So when a new page is uploaded there is no way to tell how many visitors the page might bring in. Normally it could takes months before a page is determined to be generating any type of visits, as it could take a month just to be found by the bots.

So any way back in 2009 two pages were generated covering 2N930 High Temperature Operation; one for the TO-18 package and one for the surface mount version. Well neither page generates any kind of traffic. The surface mount version had 103 pageviews and the metal can version had 342 page-views, both really low. It could also be that many of those 103 visitors were due to a click-through from the 'main' 2N930 page, meaning that the surface-mount page was getting even less page-views.

Now the combined page is 20% larger than before. The additional information is below the original data so should not decrease it's value, but increase the value of the page. That is, moving data lower down a page may decrease its value to a search engine. Leaving the text as it was maintains its prior importance, while adding more text increases the importance of the page. Another benefit is that reduces the number of pages similar to each other.

The pages have to be combined. The site map has to be updated. The deleted page has to be redirected and any graphics have to be removed from the server. Otherwise the bots would continue to download the graphics, using bandwidth for no reason.

Another page that got combined was the How to Derate a 2N2604 Transistor page. Having even less page views than the 2N930 page...... The next page to be combined will be the When to Derate a 2N2484 Transistor some time today. I've already redirected two of the sub-pages.

Also just combined the Derating a 2N4931 Transistor and 2N3743 Transistor page as well, which had the lowest page views of another of the other sets.

Other than blogging about when and why to combine pages, this post may also serve to get the updated versions spider-ed, so Google will see the update sooner.

The only down side to removing pages is that internal site pages see fewer internal links. The pages that were removed linked to other pages on the site, now they don't. Of course I might miss a link or forget to delete a graphic off the server.

Google Labs Site Performance

2011-07-15T11:37:00.003-04:00

So I haven't posted in awhile. I've just been off working on the web site, which brings in a lot more money than this blog. I have started a few posts, but never ended up finishing them, so they got deleted.

Anyway I wanted to re-post some more data on Google's Site Performance, which shows page loading speed. This is their estimate of how long it takes a page to render in a browser. Than all the pages viewed that day are averaged into a single number.

There's nothing new with this post from any of the previous posts on this topic, which can be found by searching in the blog bar above for 'site performance', but I did change a setting on the server the other day.

I had the server set up to log visitor data for both AWSTATS and Webalizer. I really use AWSTATS each day, if I look at it, but there were times when I wanted to see data from Webalizer (which formats the same data a bit different). I also use Google Analytics to capture visitors data, so I had three different programs collecting the same data. The Google product is the best, but I have history data with AWSTATS so I really want to keep that running for comparing previous years.

On the 7th of this month I turned, the server-side, Webalizer off, and waited to see if that improved the site performance of the web-site. A week later I still can't say if removing that program helped at all, but the page speed seemed to get faster {at first}.

One week of data is not much, so it's still to early to make any kind of judgment, but I am watching. The graph below shows the data for the last six months. The first big drop (increase in speed) in July is the day I turned of Webalizer. Note that the speed decreased a few days later and than decreased again, but changes in speed should be considered normal. It's the drop that got my attention.

There's nothing special about the speed, the site has hovered around 3 seconds for over a year. At this point all the pic files have been optimized, excess white space has been removed form the site and so on. Not much more I could do. Maybe send out a mess email to the world to upgrade their PC, so the site loads faster.....

I should say, that I'm always adding new data, either as new pages or additions to an existing page. So I would consider it 'normal' for the page speed to get slower regardless of what I do, because all the pages are slowly growing larger. More picture files are also always being added. So I may have reduced the [code] size of a page by removing all the white-space, but added more text off setting any speed improvement.

I'll add a comment in a few days to update the data, if it changes one way or the other. But it's something to think about, if your running a bunch of server side stuff that may not be required.

What is Googles Farmer Update

2011-03-19T12:43:00.002-04:00

The Farmer update, or Panda update was one of a few hundred algorithm changes Google makes to its search each year. The Farmer update got its name because the change was aimed at removing content farms from the search results.
A content farm is a web site set up just to trap key-word searches, but really has little or no content. Maybe hundreds or thousands of articles designed to bring in search traffic. However the articles are usually poorly written and are just filled with key words to attract traffic.

The Farmer algorithm update went live in the US on February 24th, with an update to non-US searches some time later but has yet to be announced. So if you have a site in the US and saw a decline in search traffic from Google starting on or after the 24 of last month you could be effected by the Farmer update.

One of the few comments Google has made regarding the update is that a weak page on your site could effect the entire site [which is some what new]. In the past it seemed that a weak page with little or no content would just never be indexed by Google, but never seemed to draw down other pages in the web site. Any way the forums are full of people giving advice, but the poster are just guesses.

So any way I wanted to detail a few changes that I made to the web site, not that I know I've been effected.
1. Deleted a dozen orphan pages from the server. The orphan pages had been out there for years and were mis-spelled page addresses or abandon pages that were no longer used. At one point they had news groups or what ever linking to them, so I saw no reason to show a 404 page not found. But after a few years, I'm sure that no one is reading those old news group posts and clicking in.
2. Redirected another dozen pages to something else. These page were being used, but had more weight years ago. As time has past they slowly lost content due to links going bad, or no interest from me in trying to fix them; however 10 years ago they were valid pages.
3. I removed about a dozen pages relating to advice on using Adsense, as their page views had been falling over the last few years and they did not have any relation to an engineering topic.
4. I removed a few ads on some of the pages, only because the content had decreased over time, because links on the pages were no longer working. Removing an ad was part of a normal page review and had nothing to do with the algo update. How ever some people in the forums are saying to many ads could effect a pages ranking, and pages with ads above the fold ~ I think that's garbage.
5. I fixed a number of bad links on the site, but I do that all the time. Out-going links are always going bad
6. I removed dozens of blog posting from early years on this blog. I've also done this from time to time in the past. Some times I'll write a blog post to keep the blog going, but in the big picture the post is of no interest to any one but the few people following the blog. But if Google is going to rank the entire blog based on these thin posts, then it's better just to remove them. This blog had 534 posts in Dec, but now has 512.
7. I've been optimizing HTML code on the site to reduce loading time, but I've been doing that for a year now.
8. Removing pic files from Google Picasa and storing them on the server, which should help with page loading and I've also been doing that for a year now.
9. I removed the Google tool bar because it seemed it was tracking me more than the site visitors. The tool bar measures page loading time and was showing wide variations when the load times should have been more even. I figured the tool bar was tracking 'my' page loads bringing up slower pages looking to optimize. In other words I would open a 'slow' page to fix, but showing Google a slow page. So Google was seeing more slow pages because of my tool bar usage than it normally would.
10. Updating pages with the new faster Google Analytics tracking code. I was doing that any way, and again to decrease page loading time.
11. Updating or enhancing page content ~ I do that any way.
12. Deleted or removed dozens of out going links, that were valid but seemed to be outdated ~ maybe they had a copy right of 2004 on their page. Normally the page had to many links any way, so no harm done.
13. I added a few more no-follow tags to some out going links, again their pages seems outdated.

I've been making these changes either before or after the 24th of last month and I've seen no difference in page views. However any decrease in page views that has occurred has really only occurred to a few high page-view pages, other pages are up or down as normal.

Comparing Feb to March the site is down 10%
Comparing Jan to March the site is down 0%
However March is normally higher than either of the previous months.

At the same time it could be that my site was not hit by the Algo change, rather some other sites are just doing better in the SERPS now ~ there's no way to tell. In any event these changes are normal Search Engine Optimization or SEO type changes.

Increasing Blog Traffic

2011-02-08T12:24:00.001-05:00

First you would need to write about what people are either searching for or wanting to read about.

Although I started writing this blog in 2005, I've only just started tracking visitors. Google added a 'stats' section in July of 2010. Before that, I would only track the number of referrals being sent to my Engineering Data Base. So as of 7/2010 this blog has had 15,334 pageviews, according to the data in the blog Dashboard.

Over the last 24 hours the blog received hits for posting made in 2005, 06, 07 and 2010, which should indicate that older pages still bring in traffic. That's not to say stop writing, because one of the highest page views relates to a review I wrote just 3 months ago. However the counter did just start working 6 months before that.

So sometimes I'll blog about a new product I just purchased, or review a software package I just tried. It seems that a blog posting reviewing a product brings in a lot of visits, I guess people want to find out if they should buy it as well. Many of my posting center around some electrical engineering topic, standard, or interface bus which all bring in traffic [but to a lesser degree].

Adding a graphic might also help with increasing your blog traffic, as the blog may now show up in a pic search, in addition to a web or blog only search.
The attached photo of an graphic equalizer has nothing to do with this posting topic, but it serves to introduce the links I'm adding.

Some posts are more self serving, when I post about a new page addition to the web site; however some of those posts might also serve to introduce a new product as well.

For example a week ago I added a few new pages to the engineering site, which have yet to be spidered. So what better way to get them found, than by adding them to a blog posting [and they relate to the audio pic].
A Passive Audio Base Control Circuit.
A Passive Treble Control Schematic.
A Midrange Audio Control Example.
In fact these pages have been indexed because they come up in an on-site search, but have as yet received any page views. Of course that could just be that no one is interested in a simple audio control schematic.

This blog sends about 100 visitors over to the engineering site as referring traffic. That's compared to the 2,000 plus page views the blog receives. However in the past I was promoting the web site a bit more at the bottom of this blog than I am now. Back in 2008 the blog would refer 300 web visitors per month.

Unique Vists to the Web Site

2011-01-28T21:31:00.000-05:00

This graphic shows the unique visits to interfacebus.com in three different views, in the same graph. The largest of the three shows monthly visits, month after month.

The smaller insert also shows unique web visits, but with the years overlapped one another. The smaller of the inserts also shows visits but as a year to year comparison.

The variations from month to month indicate some fluctuation in the incoming traffic. However the site receives several thousand visits per day, so many of those dips and peaks represent just one day of traffic, and some may just be the site counter going off line.

Some of the months perform better or worse than other months only due to the number of days in the month or holidays occurring during the month. A work day brings in several thousand visits, while a week-end may only bring in 50% of that. A holiday only drops the visits by 75%, mainly due to 45% of the visits coming from other countries.

This posting allows the blog to serve the graphic instead of my server, but the web site does point to this page.

Click the graphic to see the larger view.

Although it's not that relevant any longer, the large dip or drop in visits during 2005 was due to changing the web counter mid year.
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Year End Site Performance

2011-01-18T19:31:00.001-05:00

Last year ended up with the highest number of visits to the web site so far. Google would say that the total number of visits is not the best metric to watch, but I would contend that any visit is a good visit. However Google likes Time on Site or Bounce Rate, but a bounce [one page view] does not mean the visitor does not come back later.

The graph shows the number of visits to the site. The number of visits indicates a visit and/or a returning visit from the same person, as opposed to unique visits, when a returning visitor is not counted. The graph compares month-to-month visits and year-to-year visits. Except for December, this year out performed every month in all the previous years.

Around mid-year I finished implementing the new Google search bar. They say it's better {?}, but the code is smaller so I changed out the code. In 2008 I changed out all the Google banners, for that new code too, which was also smaller.

Any time I update a page I look for white space I can remove to reduce page loading time. White space is a 'space' in the html code that severs no function. Normally I can reduce a page by 200 bytes for a 10k html file and 2k for a 50k page by deleting [not visible] white space. The down side is that I also add new content when I up-date a page, so in many cases removing the white space evens out with the new text.

So it's been seven months now of optimizing the web site to increase Google's Site Performance data. Now, 7 months later the site's performance is 2.8 seconds [average load time] which happens to be what the loading time was back in June. However the average 'average' is closer to 2.8 than before, which hovered into the 3 second range.

Two weeks ago I started trading out the Google Analytic tracking code, which they also say is faster. So I hope to see a speed improvement in a few more weeks, as I get more pages running the new code. Currently there are just over 300 pages that are running the new Analytic code, but the Site Performance data is weighted so heavy trafficked pages count more. I up date pages based on need, not traffic.

Any way I'm always adding new content, regardless of any SEO things done to the site.

ReadyBoost Compatiblity with Windows 7

2010-12-24T17:24:00.002-05:00

ReadyBoost is a procedure for using a USB flash drive to augment system memory in a windows PC. ReadyBoost started with the introduction of Windows XP, and continues with Windows Vista and now Windows 7.

I've already written a Google Knol on a basic introduction to ReadyBoost on Vista so this posting really relates to Windows 7. Read more on the USB Interface, part of an Engineering Web Site.

Basically ReadyBoost allows a user to plug in a USB thumb drive [or other flash memory card] into a USB slot and set that USB drive to act like available system memory [boosting main memory]. I did try using ReadyBoost with Windows Vista on my previous computer but never really noticed any change. However three weeks ago I purchased a new computer, which I'd like to check out.

The new PC is a Dell Studio XPS8100, with an Intel Core i7-870 processor running at 2.93GHz, using 8GB DDR3 SDRAM system memory and 8MB cache. Like any personal computer the Dell uses revision 2.0 of the USB standard. Although there are 3.0 USB flash drives, there do not seem to be any computers supporting revision 3.0 of the USB spec yet.

Anyway I figured I would investigate how Windows 7 handles ReadyBoost. First off I see that Windows 7 does support ReadyBoost, but recommends adding a flash drive having a minimum of twice the system memory [16GBytes in my case].

Doing a quick check at one retailer I find that a 16GB USB thumb drive costs from $22.99 to 79.99. By comparison four 4GB DDR3 memory sticks [16GB] cost $290. So the main memory might be costing more than 3 times that of the same size thumb drive, but it's also operating much faster than the USB drive. So USB and ReadyBoost are a quick and cheap fix to enhance system operation. It doesn't matter, I don't need to purchase more memory for a PC I just received, but I would like to see how ReadyBoost works. I only use 24% of the PCs memory now anyway [indicated by some gadget on the desktop].

The price range variation in thumb drives brings in the next issue Windows 7 had with USB drives. Microsoft indicates that ReadyBoost will only work with "Fast" flash memory, and will not function with "Slow" flash memory. The help file goes on to say that some flash memory devices may contain a combination of both. So USB thumb drives using slow flash memory will not work at all, while 'faster' USB drives may not be able to use all their available memory [the 'slow' portion]. The definition or difference between fast flash memory and slow flash memory alludes me. The difference between fast and slow may explain the wide range in prices between USB drives; that being $29.99 is slow memory and $79.99 fast memory.

Most of the USB drives I just looked at did not indicate any transfer speed, although I do list them from one particular manufacturer below. Having no transfer speed data, and no knowledge of what a 'fast' transfer speed is anyway, indicates that I should only purchase a USB thumb drive that indicates that it is ReadyBoost compatible and maybe even Windows 7 compatible [in case this fast/slow issue is new to Windows 7].

Of the four different 16GB thumb drives available from one particular store, only one indicates that it supports ReadyBoost. Others do indicate that they perform fast transfers but it seems more of a comparison to USB version 1 than any indication of true transfer speed. Looks like I'll be ordering a 16GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive from PNY in the next few days to test out ReadyBoost.

USB 2.0 Transfer Speeds:
Read Speeds; 10MB/sec., 24MB/sec., 25MB/sec., 30MB/sec.
Write Speeds; 5MB/sec, 8MB/sec., 10MB/sec., 20MB/sec.

Note that the USB standard does use terms like Slow-speed, Full-speed and High-speed, but how many people read a technical specification? Regardless, how do the terms used in the USB spec relate to fast and slow used by Microsoft?

I'll up-date the post when I receive the new thumb drive, lets hope I don't lose it at the rate I'm losing all my other thumb drives.

What Video Card Should I get

2010-12-18T14:17:00.002-05:00

As of 2010 there are currently 4 major video interfaces used on either computers, PC monitors, televisions or both. The oldest is the VGA interface which started to appear on PCs in 1987.

The VGA interface has been upgraded a number of times and is now called the SVGA interface, although everyone still uses the generic term VGA to describe the interface [see note]. Even with its age and the fact that its the only analog interface left on a PC, it can still be found on the latest monitors and TVs for compatibility.

The search trend below tells the story, search interest in the term VGA [orange] has only dropped off slightly in the last 6 years. Now, there is no way to tell because the data is normalized, but the drop represents a large reduction in the number of searches.

The DVI connector is the second oldest video interface. The DVI was introduced in 1990 as a replacement to the analog VGA interface and was capable of both analog or digital operation. However the introduction of HDMI made the adaption fall off in the last few years. In fact the organization that developed the DVI specification disbanded in 2006. The graph shows a drop in DVI interest [Red], falling at about the same rate as the VGA interface. But at this point I think every body knows what a VGA interface is, its been twenty years.

The two interfaces showing an increase in searches are the HDMI output and the DisplayPort interface. From the graph, interest in HDMI appears to be growing faster the disinterest in DVI or VGA; but that make sense with so many fielded systems using either VGA or HDMI. The large spikes represent increased searches, probably due to news articles or new products being introduced.

The blue line down at the bottom of the graph represents Google searches for the term DisplayPort. It may appear that there is no interest in the new DisplayPort video interface, but that is only when compared to the vast number of searches being conducted for the other video card types. If you happen to zoom in, or re-normalize the graph with out the other video interfaces than the increase becomes apparent [shown below].

Interest in Displayport has doubled over the last few years, up four fold from its release date.

Many times when a interface standard is released it takes another year before products begin to hit the market. In the case of a video standard you need at least two different manufacturers producing products; one selling a video card and a different manufacturer selling a computer monitor. Then there's the issue of demand; a company making PC monitors may not want to go to the expense of designing a new interface when the mating interface is not yet available on a video card. So in some cases it may take a few years for a new video standard to take hold.

For example DisplayPort may have been released in 2007, but video cards with a DisplayPort interface may not have appear until 2008 followed sometime later by computer monitors.

Anyway the best video monitor interface to use is DisplayPort, or HDMI on a TV. They're both digital interfaces, but HDMI is more common than DisplayPort.

Note; The search trend for the term VGA shows a dramatic drop in search usage from 2004 to 2007 and a steady decline onward. But when compared to the term SVGA, SVGA does not even register on the same graph. In other words the term VGA is being searched for 20 to 25 times more than the term SVGA.

In general I keep my PC for around two years and the monitors for about four years. The two AOC 2436 monitors I'm currently using [AOC 2436-vh review] has both a HDMI and VGA interfaces. So they don't have the newest DisplayPort interface or the out-dated DVI interface, but a good mix of both analog and digital connectors. My Dell SX8100 computer uses an ATI Radeon HD 5770 video card with dual-link DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. Note the lack of a VGA interface
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Browser Compatibility

2010-12-14T14:01:00.004-05:00

2010 Browser Usage

For years now I figured that most issues between the different web browsers had stabilized, or at least worked fine with my web pages. The html code used with the Engineering Web Site is pretty basic, nothing special, but there was a time when I checked the pages between the different internet browsers.

Primarily I would be looking for layout changes between the different browsers, small changes in spacing or page breaks. As a rule the pages were always working between the different programs. But all that was a long time ago, I stopped checking page issues half a dozen years ago. Back then I would load all the different web browsers on the PC and check pages for compatibility.

Now I just run the three major browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. However I don't run them looking for problems, I run them with each one opening different windows and or passwords.

Anyway over the last few months I've noticed page layout issues with my unique 404 page [the page that displays on a mistyped web address]. I sort of looked at it but never really did any thing about it because I couldn't find the problem. Now I realize that the layout problem was only showing up in Google Chrome, which I hadn't noticed before. With three different browsers it's kind of random which pages show up in which browser depending on what I'm working on.

So I have three different style of pages, and two of those styles use the HTML 'DIV' tag which puts a column on either the right or left side of the page. The pages that use the DIV tag to put a column on the right side of the page seems to work in all three browsers. However the pages that use a DIV to add a left hand column don't seem to work in Google Chrome. Any text or graphic that uses a 'center' tag is forced out of the column and below the content of the main section. So left margin text remains in the div column while a 'center' graphic is pushed out into the adjacent column.

Lucky for me, the pages with the issue only account for 1% of the page-views or around 37,000 pageviews. Ten percent of that are people using Google Chrome viewing only 370 pages in these sections. The 14 pages that account for most of the issue [0.67%] were just fixed as well as some of the others. The thing is, if you never scrolled down to the bottom of the page, the layout problem might not have even been noticed.

Oh, the fix is to just remove the center tag around the graphics in the left column. That was the quick fix, there must be an html coding issue with the div tags, but the point is to get them working right now....

So the advice would be to check you pages in all the browsers.

The pie chart represent 4,221,889 pageviews year-to-date for the web site.
239,690 of those page views were from people using Google Chrome.
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Google Sites Free Web Page

2010-12-07T12:28:00.001-05:00

V22 Osprey

I don't often blog about how my Google Sites page is doing, but as part of an end-of-year thing I'll go ahead and add a few words. I call the site interfacebus, just like the main site. Google sites is free, so I can't really have to many complaints, but it's a bit hard to organize the pages by topic.

Each sub-page has the address of the upper level pages so the URLs get pretty long. Or you really need to plan ahead when generating new pages. However I don't know what page I'm going to add at any given time. So some of the pages addresses are really long. I guess it doesn't matter if a person comes to the site via a search engine, or if their navigating the site via the site-map.

The graphic is part of a report from Google Analytics, like many of the graphs in this blog, comparing last years hits or visits to this year. This year the site has had 14,532 visits, and 20,903 pageviews, over 165 different URLs. However only 133 pages are included in Google index.

Many of the pages really just hold some large graphic that didn't fit on the main site, but in most cases there is a small amount of text. I don't add pages as often as on the other site, but much of the increase in visits is due to new pages, or maybe new pictures.
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Increasing Page Views

2010-12-04T07:39:00.002-05:00

I don't really track the number, but I add around two or three new pages to the Engineering Site each month.

Of course I would hope that the new page(s) would generate more incoming visitors, but there's little chance of that. Remember it takes three months just to get a page rank and start to show up in the Search Engine Pages [SEP]. Maybe another month before that until Google spiders and reads the page. Or any page I generated in the last half of the year had no chance of receiving any page views.

So the table below compares pageviews from this year to last year. It might seem like that there's not much of a change, but most pages increased in page views. However many pages still hover around the first three rows. So many of the pages I added only received just a few page views, with almost no page views during the first three months.

However there's another way to look at the situation. A new page may bring in a new visitor, which might revisit the site.

The increase in pages in the first row are new pages. Most of the rest of the pages are stuck there.
There are 50 pages that make up the 6 year old Index of Semiconductor Manufacturers section that refuse to get a Page Rank, no matter how many times I link to them. Most of the 3 year old 115 pages that make up the Transistor Derating Curves section also have never received a Page Rank, regardless of what I've done.

I just updated a 3 year old page that only received 8 page views this year. I pulled a 90k pic file off Picasa, reduced it to 50k and stored it on my server. I deleted another Picasa graphic altogether because it could be found by an on-page link. I also changed a few important key words. The point was not to get more pages views, its transistor part number [page topic] must be obsolete so the page will never receive any page views.

Instead what I did was make the page look less like the other 115 similar pages in that section, and make it load faster [for Google] to keep them happy. Files that are stored external to the site require a DNS look-up, which Google thinks slows down a site ~ part of Google's rating systems measures page loading speed. The 50k file on my server should not hurt because the page is never viewed, except by the web spiders. So having this page appear different may help the pages getting page-views, because one less page looks the same.

Anyway if a page received 1,000 page-views last year it would have to see over a 900% increase to move up to the next row. So understandably most pages stay in the same row they were found in last year, even if they had a 100% increase in views.

The site is currently receiving 7.21% more Pageviews than last year, with 3,978,019 current pageviews. So the site has already passed the number of page views received last year. The table above is Pageviews, the chart to the left is number of visits.

The program that generates the data is Google Analytics, and the report is Top Data, order from highest pageviews down [which I then just count]. Using Google Analytics requires a small amount of Java code on each of your web pages.

Many of the pages in my report with only one page view for the year are really just mis-spelled page addresses. The viewer just sees the sites 404, page not found, but the report records it as the address that the server received. Many types of 'wrong addresses can be filtered, but many can't, sometimes I can't even tell if it's a real page address with out pulling up the page. Opening the page will give it another count which could cause it to look like a real page address when I check it later. So the first row of data is an estimate, because I started to get down to the misspelled pages in the report.

This is a long post just to say that adding new pages or worrying about getting those pages included in the Google index may not help the over-all web site. You still need to come up with content that people are looking for.
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Internet Browser Usage

2010-12-03T12:07:00.002-05:00

Being the end of the year I figured I would post which browser visitors use for the engineering data base. Some people watch these numbers, and even small changes make one of the technical papers. But like me, once in a while they probably just need something to post about.

I could care less which browser is doing better than another, because I use all three at once. I have some pages open in Firefox, others in Explorer and still others in Google Chrome. I just wish they would put the buttons and options in the same place in each of the programs.

The graphic shows the steady decline in Internet Explorer usage over the last four years, and the steady increase in Firefox usage. Although Firefox has only increased less than 1% from 2009. It would appear that Google Chrome is taking the steam out of Firefox's usage, increasing 6% over the last year. I assume 6% Firefox would have gotten if not for Chrome. Safari has also passed Opera usage for the first time, but only by a half percent.

I don't use either Opera of Safari, but years ago I did try Opera for a while. But like I said, as soon as the PC boots up, the other three browsers open.... once. The data for 2010 account for 3,094865 unique visits so it's a big data sample. Counting the return visitors would make the data sample larger, but what's the point, it would just make the browsers on the increase look better and the ones on the decline look worse.

There are other browsers being used to access the web site but their percent usage are all below 1% ~ Below 20,000 web visits, or two days of web visits. The site receives about 9,000 hits per day.
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URLs in Web Index

2010-12-02T07:57:00.004-05:00

This would be the third revision or up-date to the posting of the web stats showing URLs in Web Index.
The stats relate to this Engineering Web Portal.

The table of data below shows the number URLs or pages in Google's web index. First of all I don't like to generate new site maps that often because of the bandwidth requirements of the sitemap program. That is the program I run needs to check every page I have on the server, so it's a big hit to my server. But if you look at the data and the increasing number of URLs in the web index you will notice that generating a sitemap over and over again is not required.

However I do recommend running a new sitemap if you have a large amount of new pages. The number of URLs in the web index always increases after a site-map is generated. However you'll notice that in some cases the number of indexed pages falls off a few days later. I assume the program reading the sitemap finds the new pages and adds them to the web index, but sometime later another computer algorithm determines the page should not be index and they drop off the index.

01/21/11 = 1,938 urls in web index [Site-map loaded]
11/30/10 = 1,875 urls in web index.
11/04/10 = 1,854 urls in web index.
10/23/10 = 1,805 urls in web index.
07/24/10 = 1,779 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
07/01/10 = 1,535 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
06/30/10 = 1,504 urls in web index.
06/24/10 = 1,455 urls in web index.
06/18/10 = 1,426 urls in web index.
05/31/10 = 1,400 urls in web index.
05/22/10 = 1,394 urls in web index.
04/07/10 = 1,309 urls in web index.
03/27/10 = 1,322 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/19/09 = 1,481 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/13/08 = 1,318 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]

There are two reasons why the number of URLs in the web index are increasing. First I generate at least two or three new pages every month, sometimes many more. So you would except to see an increasing number of pages included in the web index as those new pages are found and included. Secondly I'm always updating preexisting pages already residing on the web-site. So after time the up-dates may allow a page to be indexed, usually because it has more content [text]. Many times I'll add a new page topic that is little more than a graphic and a small description. But over time I get back to up-dating the page to include more data and so on. Once the page gets 'the required amount' of content Google included the URL into the web index.

How soon your new page shows up in the web index, with out a sitemap, depends on how often your pages are crawled. The chart shows that my site has 500 pages crawled every day, although you can't tell from that how many pages are re-crawled. So for my site any new page added is found within a few days, I assume 15 days ~ so I don't really need a sitemap.

Although it has little to do with the number of URLs in the web index, over and over I see new pages not receiving any incoming hits for months. That is even as a new page gets included in the web index, it takes three months for the page to really start getting any visits. Web Masters call that the Google sand box. So don't think that just because a page gets indexed that it will bring in a larger number of hits the next day. Also I have groups or sections of pages that have dropped of the index, for years now. Currently I have 1,946 URLs submitted and 1,875 URLs included. That three month "down-time" is also the same amount of time it takes a page to get a Google Page Rank. [if it ever gets one].

2N3485 Transistor Derating. 3 year old page with zero page rank.
Semiconductor Manufacturers 'L'. 5 year old page with zero page rank.
Electron Tube Classification 2 week old page with 0 page rank.
74L121 Monostable Multivibrator IC. 1 week old page with 0 page rank.

Note always run your site-map generator program at night or when you expect low incoming traffic. Remember that program is talking to your server, which would be in direct competition with your visitors.

Also I have no idea how to determine which pages of my site are not included in the web index, other wise I might fix those pages.

The number of web pages; URLs in web index change every week or so, the numbers listed above are just the ones I wrote down.
. err click the title to read the comments, if you didn't come to this specific topic. The blog compresses the comments section unless you're on that particular page. The comments are updates to the blog post.
.......

Mobile Device Usage Statistics

2010-12-01T22:09:00.001-05:00

As part of up dating the FAQ for the Engineering Site, I'm inserting a posting about which mobile devices are accessing the web site. I haven't checked this data type since the last post a year ago, looks like there's been a change. Incoming visits from mobile devices have doubled over this last year. However doubling a small number is still a small number. The Frequency Ask Questions pages don't get many hits, but I still like to keep the information updated. In order to save server bandwidth I redirect some of the FAQ data out to this blog, but it's still an interesting data point for blog readers.

I tried to check for a percentage change year-to-year in the mobile phones using the site, but for what ever reason Google didn't have it [or said it was estimated]. So the only thing I'll show is this years data and which phones are being used the most, but no change from year-to-year. Of course most of the visits [46%] are coming from an iPhone which is understandable.

A few years back there was a particular way a web page had to be set up to work on a mobile device ~ I assume that's not required any longer with the newer systems and bigger screens. Any way it doesn't matter I don't have time to rewrite 2,000 web pages just for 3,000 hits a year. The site receives 9,000 a day from people on a normal computer. But it is nice to see an increase in any of these reports I pull up, makes me think I'm getting some place.

This graph shows visits, which are increasing. However all the other metrics are worse than normal computer visitors except percent new visits. Meaning most people coming in are new to the site, but they leave faster and view fewer pages than normal computer 'people'.

How to get more incoming links

2010-11-26T23:40:00.000-05:00

I'm looking at the Crawl Errors from other web sites pointing to my Engineering Site. There must be 100 external links pointing to my site that are misspelled [some my have */ or other characters]. The incoming links point to about 40 different pages on my site. Many of the links appear to be copies of each other, as in 6 different web sites using the same bad web address. Some of the incoming links are from web forums or blogs which would explain why there are more than one different page using the same bad link. I still get the 404 page hit regardless, but I'll bet most people just click away.

But why would different web pages use invalid links, it just makes their page look inaccurate. In some cases it appears that a page is using my data but not really giving me proper credit, with an invalid link. You would think they would check their links.

Anyway it seems like Google is increasing their web directory, although I can't tell if these pages show up in a Google search. One forum posting was done in 2007, but Google indicates it was found in Nov of 2010 [Google uses the term Discovery Date]. Same thing for another page link, two incoming links were discovered in 2007, but five more bad links [copies] were found in 2010.
------------

AOC 2436vh LCD Monitor Review

2010-11-17T13:14:00.004-05:00

I purchased a new Dell PC a few weeks ago which I don't want to review for a few more days. However I do want to review the AOC monitor I purchase at the same time. The AOC was a seperate purchased that did not come with the Dell.

The AOC monitor is a 24 inch wide screen, longer than wider. It seems like a nice display but the problem I have with it is the display size. Currently I have almost a 1 inch black border around the display which means I really have a 22 inch monitor and not a 24 inch which I purchased. A blank border as in no information is displayed, so is unusable.

I've tried using the soft keys on the display to correct the display problem, but either the monitor will not fill in the display or I can't figure out the correct key sequence.

AOC has a video [animated] help sequence showing the bottom sequence for a similar monitor, but I just couldn't follow it. To get to the soft screen buttons I need, I have to turn other functions off [I think]. But if I can't figure how to change the screen size in 20 minutes, than my opinion is they got it wrong. For what ever reason the AOC site does not have any help files out under the 2436vh selection.

Now I could have wrote a review out at Best Buy, maybe to help some one else thinking about buying this monitor, but I didn't want to create an account. Or I didn't want tons of e-mail from Best Buy for the rest of my life. There was a comment in their reviews section that mentioned the softkeys, but it was only one out of 5 reviews. There are also a few requests for help out on the web with the same border issue, but as usually there are no answers, just more comments.

I would not recommend buying the AOC 2436vh because I can't figure out how to adjust the screen size. If an electrical engineer can't figure out how to adjust the screen size I wouldn't expect a normal PC user to solve the problem either.

I'm using
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium.
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5770, with 1 GB GDDR5 video memory [HDMI connection]
Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1080 [which is recommended], Landscape

I also have another 18 inch monitor connected to the same video card [at a different resolution], but that shouldn't matter. I plan to replace the 18" also but not with an AOC monitor. I'm glad I only purchased one monitor with the computer. Maybe next week I'll go out and get a replacement monitor, after I do a bit more research. Also see Companies making PC Monitors.

At least I got a blog post out of this. I'll append an up-date when I get the next monitor. I'll look around for a factory reset also.

About three hours after I wrote this post I changed the monitor resolution and the display filled the screen. Now I had tried that before but only the next lower resolution which the monitor indicated was not support, while this last time I took it down one more notch. Two hours after I got the screen resolution right I received an e-mail from AOC asking if I had tried to reduce the screen resolution, which is good because I had only posted a question to their support a few hour before. Regardless, I still don't like how they do their soft screen controls.

So the reason why the 2436vh hdmi does not fill screen is because of the computer resolution setting. I'm using HDMI for this monitor, and all the seach phrases I've seen include the term HDMI [including searches finding this page].

The monitor defaults to the highest resolution the display will handle, which in turn leads to dead-space around the visible display. The highest resolution is 1920 x 1080. However the Resolution I'm using now is 1680 x 1050, but I'm also using a screen with an aspect ratio of 16:9. So I can't tell if it's a monitor issue, an aspect ratio issue or an HDMI issue.

Percent Change in Visitors

2010-11-03T18:59:00.000-04:00

Been a few weeks with out a blog post so I figured I would just post how the web site is doing this year.
So the main site has increased 15% over last year for visits and 9% for Pageviews.
So far there have been 3,734,492 page views this year.

The Knols visits are up 642% ; example Component Derating.
Google Sites are up 94%; example X-Band Radar.
Serialphy is up 40%

I did get a new computer but I wanted to use it a few weeks before I posted a review.

2007 -2010 Visits

cpu Heat Sink Fan Stopped Spinning

2010-10-14T10:13:00.000-04:00

So I'm working on the computer last night and the PC just shuts down. At first I figured I had a power glitch, but the TV was still on. When I turned it back on the BIOS indicated my fan was not turning. How did I not notice that, the PC sounds like a plane taking off.

Any way I power off and back on to get it the fan to start again but that didn't work. So I turn the PC on its side and pulled the cover, flicked the fan a few times and tried the power on/off again. I reconnected the fan cable thinking it may be a loose connection, but no luck.

This is the cpu fan that really connects to a brick of a heat sink sitting on the cpu. It took a few tries before I could disconnect the fan from the heatsink, but I did get it off. Because other than banging on the fan I really couldn't do any thing. It's not like I could some how fix a fan, but I should have used that time to write down the model number.

So the next day, the fan is spinning now but I didn't do any thing. The internal case temperature is 92.8F and the room temperature is 80.1F. My office is always hotter than the rest of the house, to much electronics in the room and far away from the AC [which is set at 76F]. The PC has been on for about 15 minutes now, after doing a quick backup to a USB thumb drive, as the last backup was more than three weeks ago.

The weird thing is that I was just looking on line at new PCs yesterday, maybe it is time. However other than moving from DD2 to DDR3 I could find a good reason to upgrade. Now maybe I should start looking for a FAN and at the same time get another 2G of memory ~ why not if I'm popping the case anyway.

Well I didn't write down the fan type, I just wanted the time to do a back-up. But I did note this is an AMD socket 939 PC. I don't really want the Heat-Sink fan combo, I'll just take the fan. Not because of the extra $40 but because I don't want to mess around with the cpu to heat sink connection point. I haven't built a PC from scratch for 15 years. Why build one when I can just pick all the components on-line and have it delivered.

Domain Name expired

2010-10-05T18:15:00.000-04:00

So my web site went off-line today from around 8am to 5pm. At first I figured it was something I had done because I was adding a few more passwords late last night. But it turns out that my Domain Name had expired.

Now the strange thing is that one of the first things I checked when I could not get my Hosting company to answer their phone. Whois indicated it would expire next year; however I did find an e-mail from last year from my hosting company that it would expire this year ~ So I'm not sure what is up.

What I'm not happy about is that it took about 8 hours for my hosting guy to answer my trouble ticket, their phone was never answered over the entire 8 hours either. I never even received a warning e-mail I was about to have an issue either, which turned out to be an old credit card on file with them.

Their home page indicates that because of all the great stuff they offer and their low price, they do not offer support. What? I've been with these guys for years and nothing is new, except for their lack of support. So it's time to start getting ready to get a new hosting company.

Disallow access to server stat files

2010-09-01T09:49:00.005-04:00

So after 10 years on the web the spiders have found my server stat files, in this case AWSTATS. This is the program output I use to see data regarding site visitors; number of visits, page views, visit duration, key words and on and on. The program stores the data in large text [txt] files, but outputs the data to me in the form of charts and graphs. In fact the txt files are very large, multi-Mega Byte files, the graphs are some what smaller and more readable.

I would recommend that every web master add a 'Disallow' line to the robots.txt file to stop the web spiders from reading your stat files. In my case the line looks like this; Disallow: /awstats/.

The bottom curve is server bandwidth ~ the increase occurs as my stat files started showing up in my search results. Because the graph is set up to show number of visitors, the bandwidth is normalized. So the 100,000 horizontal bar which indicates 100,000 visits or page views... indicates 10GB of server bandwidth for the bottom curve. The 200,000 line indicates 20GB for bandwidth

I only noticed the server text files showing up in search result about a month ago, because normally I don't need to search my own engineering site ~ right, I wrote it. So I only added a 'block' to the robots file a few weeks ago; however I recommend that you block access now even if you don't have an issue. It only takes a few minutes to add and if you pay for bandwidth or blocked if you exceed bandwidth it may well be worth the time.

If you look back to 2006/2007 you can see that bandwidth tracked unique visits, but by 2008 the gap stated to widen. Two years before Google started to rank pages on down-load speed I had already started to make the web site more efficient.

Unfortunately now the bandwidth data is meaningless, because it only shows these large txt statistic files being downloaded. For example one 2.52MB txt file was downloaded 230 times last month, a 4.11MB file was downloaded 98 times. That's 328 visitors that used the search bar and received bogus results, are they going to come back for a second visit? Really its much worse, before I stopped counting, there were 1,206 people last month who thought that one of those text files was a valid search return.

Download Speed vs Site Performance

2010-08-30T10:50:00.000-04:00

I check Google's data on the Engineering Site all the time, again today I rechecked the Site Performance. At least for the last few weeks the time it takes to down-load a page has decreased [always a good thing]. The attached graphic shows the amount of time it takes Google to down-load pages on the site. The numbers don't represent a single page but the average of some number of pages Googlebot tried to read. I don't really think the data is that accurate, because it never takes 4 seconds to download a page, but I read the data because that's what Google is looking at to determine site performance.

There is no way to tell why my site is coming in faster. The server could be working faster, Google pulled fewer pages or Google pulled small pages; who knows? Well I can check and see how many pages Google crawled per day and it's about the same between now and mid June. Google Crawl Stats indicate an average of 673 pages per day over the last few months.

However; I've been working on making the site faster for months, but not really getting anything to work. The basic problem is that any time I update a page and make the HTML text smaller [less code], I add more data making the page larger. So I may make the html code more efficient [decreasing download times], but I add more human readable text increasing the download time.

The current data [below] indicates the average time to download pages on the site takes 2.6 seconds. This is only important because Google rates site by download speed, so it's Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

Related Blog Posts;
Page Download Times [7-15-2010] 3.1 seconds to download
Speed Performance Overview [6-16-2010] 2.8 seconds to download
Web Site Performance [4-22-2010] 3.7 seconds to download
Google now ranks pages by speed [4-14-2010] No speed data.
Website Speed Performance [4-3-2010] 3.7 seconds to load.

IE 8 takes forever to shut down

2010-08-22T21:39:00.000-04:00

I'm not really sure why but Internet Explorer takes a long time to close down. When I close down a single tab, the tab closes right away. However when I close down the program it takes forever to shut down, with the first few tabs taking the longest amount of time. I always have three browsers open; IE, Firefox and Chrome.

I tried looking up reasons on the web, but no luck. Just a bunch of real old IE crashing issues or out of date info.

Anyway here is how the top five browsers are doing on the engineering site: Explorer usage continues to decline, while Firefox seems to have stalled. Both browsers seem to be getting hurt by the increase in Chrome usage. Chrome did not exist before 2009.

1/1/2010 to 8/21/2010
Internet Explorer = 49.08% [800,493 visitors]
Mozilla Firefox = 35.15% [573,338 visitors]
Google Chrome = 8.66% [141,218 visitors]

Link Checker Firefox Extension

2010-08-18T16:13:00.001-04:00

I went ahead and hand-checked about 20 pages in the OEM Manufacturers section. Now I did just check the entire web site the other day, but there's a catch. Those automated programs do not always find 'bad-links'.

If a site goes bad or out of business and their web site payment becomes due, then ads could pop-up instead of the old engineering information. Seems right, once the payments run out the domain registrar takes over and runs their own ads, and the site appears "good" to the automated software checker. So you still need to hand check links. Any way I only found one 'bad' link which pointed to an ad, out of 20 pages and 2 hours of checking.

I found Link Checker on the web today and I down loaded the program (but have not used it yet). What I have used is the Firefox Browser extension for Link Checker that checks links on a per page basis. Yes it's another automated program, but now if needed I can check a single page with out checking the entire site. Link Checker seemed to work well. I used it to check each of the 'A' pages in the OEM Company section.

While testing it I noticed that it checked all the internal and external links on a page. However when I went to the next page all my internal links went 'green' right away, telling me that the program was not rechecking them ~ which is good. Link Checker uses color to indicate if a link is good or bad, so some what easy to use. I just tried three other pages but all the links are coming up good. Maybe I'll post a comment in a few days if I do find a bad link with the program, or if I load and run the entire .exe version of the program. The best I can get is a Yellow link which I assume is a 'no robots allowed', not checked link.....

So it's not all about adding new pages, sometimes you have to insure that the pages that are already out there are good, or are otherwise not hurting the web site. I also should have said that the Link Checker program is fast, but only as fast as the site it's checking; right, because it has to wait until it gets a response from the external site.

How often should site links be checked

2010-08-15T14:29:00.000-04:00

I normally try to check external links on the site every 3 months or so. I'd like to check more often but I just see it as a severe hit to my server, because the link checker program has to read every page. At the same time it's a lot of work to use this program because at any given time there are always a few dozen websites off-line for what ever reason, so I have to recheck those. Of course how many companies could go out of business or change hands in a three month time period.

Any way this time around there were about 20 bad links including 3 from me, pointing to a misspelled address on my own site. I still have a few more links in my to-do box, waiting a few days to see if they come back on-line. The attached graphic shows the data produced by the link checker program. Over 99.5% of the links were good, but I didn't track all the link conditions. The report indicates I have 7,815 external links and 1,917 internal [page-to-page] links; because there are 1,917 pages that make up the web site.

So if you have external links it's always a good idea to keep them up to date. You never know who buys up the link once its gone bad. Search engines don't like broken links and of course visitors never like bad links, they just make the site seem abandoned. Oh I should also say I tried using the program over the last few week but just kept getting to many broken internal links in the report making the report impossible to use ~ the program was over-loading my server. The program and server worked ok today....

At the same time I fixed those bad links I also made what ever updates were required on the 20 pages that were 'fixed', making the process take twice as long as it needed.

Click to enlarge the graphic.

Computer Generated Pages

2010-08-10T21:26:00.001-04:00

So I don't really know how many engineers read this blog, but I really need to comment on all these auto generated pages on the internet. Any time I try to look up a part on the internet all the search results that come back are just PC generated pages with nothing more than 100's of part numbers. Now a few of the pages do have a data sheet but they make you click through three pages to find the pdf version. So it's a bit time consuming to find a data sheet for a part that's less than common.

Up until a few months ago a search on Google would let you select the bogus site so they would not reappear in the search results. So by the next search I wouldn't let many of these sites show up. However instead of the de-select function Google changed that to a 'vote-for' star. When I'm looking for these components I don't see many sites to vote for. I just tested out Yahoo and they did a bit better, but not by much.If these guys would just add some content they wouldn't need 10,000 auto generated pages with every part number known to man....

Anyway I vented ~ I was looking for a Zener diode LVA62 which was on page 1 of Yahoo and 4 or 5 on Google. But every week I'm looking up part numbers....

I should also say this occurs much more often when looking for a part that may no longer be second sourced or in production decline, a part that is no longer in full production. I don't really have the same problem with newer parts, never if I know the current manufacturer ~ I can just go to the OEM's site and get the data sheet from there.

Digital Living Network Alliance Products

2010-08-04T20:17:00.001-04:00

I mentioned this DLNA certified BluRay player yesterday, thinking I might need it. I'm sure I would like to have DLNA but that may be years away. Because except for the BluRay player which I haven't even purchased yet no other gear that I have is compatible and I see no need to change any thing out until they break. Wireless stuff would be nice but I don't really think I would ever use any of it. I gave away the spare PC I had connected to the HDTV because I never used it, that was wireless too, but not to the TV. I assume the BluRay player would be called a Digital Media Player [DMP].

I would like a new PC but I've been waiting to figure out what they were going to do with USB 3.0 and for PCI-Express 3.0 to be released So I'm about a year away from getting a new PC, but maybe I don't need one [New PC Posting 4/23/10]. The Digital Living Network Alliance indicates that I would need a DLNA certified Network Attached Storage [NAS] device, which I could get instead of a new PC (I guess). I'm not really sure why I would need a network drive when a DLNA certified PC should work, I assume. I'm not really sure if a NAS is the same as a DMS [Digital Media Server] [HDD Vendors].

So the 2 year old 47" flat screen I just blogged about the other day does not appear to be compatible. The 53" or 57" floor model out in the front room has to be 10 years old and the 37" CRT in the back room is even older so this whole idea of caring about DLNA is out the window. I could be years away from getting a new TV.

So it would appear this blog posting is pointless, unless it helps someone like me to understand that unless their buying a whole new system DLNA is just not required.

DVD Player No Disk

2010-08-02T08:26:00.001-04:00

I just tried out my KLH 221 DVD player after years of having the thing sitting in my closet. The company is either called KLK Audio or KLH Audio Systems, but I'm not sure of the correct name. Any way I haven't used the thing for about 5 years, and I have no idea when I purchased the player. I had the DVD player setup in a back room that I never used, so it never got a lot of play time, but it was working several years ago.

I tried 3 or 4 DVDs in it yesterday but each time the LCD screen would just display 'No disk', which I assume means it could not read the DVD. However now that I'm thinking about it I don't recall the thing even spinning up. I tried rebooting a few times by pulling the plug but nothing seemed to work. Maybe I'll try it out one more time. Now I did try a quick web search for the model KLH 221, but I couldn't find much or a manual. Most of the web posting were just 'trash' sites with the same re-posts over and over. It could be that this DVD player is almost ten years old, I think it was the first one I ever purchased. Could it be because the CMOS battery went bad and the player no longer remembers how to work, maybe I need some reset code? Oh the remote was still working, that was a surprise.

I do have another DVD player in the front room that I've wanted to replace with a BluRay player. So I guess it's time for a new BluRay for the front room and moving that DVD player into the back room, replacing the one that no longer works. I would have rather purchased a new BluRay in my own time and not because some other system failed. I already have a BluRay in my office, and I may just re-purchase another new Sony BluRay player. I like Sony gear for the front room because that would match the other Sony gear and should work with the Sony remote I use out there.

I see a few reviews that the newer BluRays are loading the disk faster, it's about time. I also see some that have DLNA capability, I guess I want that. I'll have to look around for a few more days.

Just in case the chart in the previous post is a bit busy or hard to read I show the same data a different way. It should be a little easier to see that the site is still doing better than any previous year, but down these last few months because that's the mid-year trend. Of course the visits are way down, but I've always found that the higher the hits the bigger the drops. Maybe one more month before hits start to increase again. Click the image for a larger view of the data.

Server Bandwidth increasing

2010-08-01T12:30:00.000-04:00

Even as visitors to the web site have been decreasing over the last few months bandwidth has increased. Now it's normal for site hits to decrease during this time of the year, normal for my site.

In March there were 190,622 unique visitors to the site using 14.64G Bytes of bandwidth.
In June there were 156,355 unique visitors to the site using 16.15G Bytes of bandwidth.
In July there were 150,100 unique visitors to the site using 17.03G Bytes of bandwidth.

Checking Googlebot Crawl Stats the amount of data downloaded did double for the end of July, but only to a high of 28kBytes per day. However the number of pages crawled stayed about average at 812 pages per day. So the only assumption that can be made is that Google was reading pages with more pictures than normal. Some pages have more graphics than normal; also, some of the graphic files are local to the server and some are held out on Picasa. Of course the ones located on Google Picasa do not effect my bandwidth.

Now I have removed a few dozen pic files from Picasa over the last few months. Google started to rank web sites based on down-load speed and they considered getting the pic files from 'Google' Picasa as slow. Not because Picasa is slow, although it maybe, but because they consider looking up the DNS [address] of another web site as being inherently slow. The most relevant posting was Web Site Speed Enhancements.

Last month I did up-load a new site-map to the server which Google has been reading every few days. The site map is 300k Bytes which is the size of about 60 html files, or maybe 30 files if you were to count the pic files too. The reason for up-loading the sitemap was to try and get more pages included in Google's index, which I have but maybe at the cost of server bandwidth. June 30 had 1,504 pages in Google's search index [URL's in Web Index], and as of July 28 there were 1,782 files included in Google's Index.

The server counter AWSTATS indicates that Googlebot used 285.97MB of server bandwidth, and the spider from Yahoo used 227.35MB of bandwidth. I have a [BaiDuSpider] spider from China that used 681.53MBytes of bandwidth. I noticed that a number of internet posts have had issues with the amount of data being indexed by this particular spider. It would appear that over the previous few months BaiDuSpider was only reading about 15MB/months so maybe it just got around to reading the entire web-site.

Now checking Google Analytics I see no real increase in visits from China, a little over 3,000 a month for the last three months. The top 10 robots used almost 3G Bytes of bandwidth, it's to bad their not sending me more traffic.

Even Alexa used over 329MBytes to spider my site, to bad my traffic rank is down 26,000 [-10% Reach] but then that would figure because my hits are down as well.
Oh and I just noticed that Google is also reading my text files from my stats counter, so that's another 20M of data it got off my server.

I guess I should also mention that over the last thirty days I've added maybe 30 pages and maybe that many pic files so that would account for a bit of the increase too. Anyway check out the attached chart, the lowest trend is bandwidth [normalized] ~ click to enlarge.

Westinghouse TX-47F430S 47"Flat Screen Review

2010-07-31T20:13:00.001-04:00

I purchased this 47 inch flat screen a few years ago, and for the most part I like how it works. I did add a post for the TV but never wrote a review for it. Early this year I hocked up a BluRay player and I had a few issues with the TV auto detecting the signal. I ended up turning the TV off and back on until it found the signal, actually I had to unplug the set because just turning it off didn't help. Any way the TV always detects the BluRay now and I just figured it was me not reading the directions, However I did move the BluRay over to the HDMI 1 channel connector. I just found some reviews on the web and other people were having the same issue of not detecting the incoming signals [auto-source switching]. Seems to work fine now.

I like the set, the 1080p picture is great but I really just use the set in my office while I'm working on the web site.
So over the last few months the sound has gone out, or slowed down ~ like putting your finger on an LP to slow the sound down. Again I have to unplug the set to get it to reset. I canceled cable a few months ago so I use a Terk antenna to watch TV, or just use a DVD. I only just started over-the-air TV a few months ago and that's when the issue started. I have to assume that when the TV starts to lose the signal it gets a bit confused.

I purchased this HDTV in 2008 but it looks like they still sell it so the review is still valid. Maybe they have fixed these issues by now, but the TV has only done this stuff a few times.

Blogger has some new features

2010-07-24T17:13:00.000-04:00

Blogger is finally coming out with some new settings, and it's about time.
I've been on Blogger for about 5 years now and it seems that Google never adds any thing new, at least until this year. It does add new templates from time to time, but I've never been interested in changing. Now at the beginning of the year Google allowed Amazon to display ads on Blogger, so that's different.

Now Google has added Stats, so you can tell who visits the blog or what page the visitor views. Up until now I had used the stats from the ads that I run to tell how often that the blog was being visited. I also used Google Analytics to see who then visited www.interfacebus.com and what page they came from. They're both round-about ways to tell how the blog is doing, but I never got around to adding a free counter to the blogger template.

Blogger only just started counting pages last month, so I only have one month of data. The page with the most visits was written in 2008, followed by one from 2010, 2006, and 2005.

I just tried to up-load an image and I see they changed that function too. Instead of 'up-load a file' I get add from Blogger, Picasa, or from an html address ~ so I'm lost and will not be adding a picture from the stats counter??

Page Download Times

2010-07-15T12:26:00.001-04:00

Google Site Performance, Down Load Speed

So I did end up generating a new site-map last week using GSiteCrawler. Among the other statistics the program outputs, GSiteCrawler provides Top Slowest Pages to Download.
[also Top largest pages [Time and Size/Time], and Slowest pages to crawl].

So GSiteCrawler indicates around a second to down-load a page, or crawl the page [below] . The screen capture shows the top slowest 30 pages from the engineering web site, but I think that is only text downloads and does not include any picture files. But I wanted to compare that to what Google indicates to download a page, which does include picture files.

Google indicates [above] that on average it takes 3.1 seconds to down load a page off the web, or more than 3 times longer than the other crawler indicated. As of July 7th Google indicates that 53% of any other web site is faster than my site. The last posting with a graph on 6/16 indicated 2.8 seconds [Performance Graph], while the one on 4/22 indicated 3.7 seconds to download [Performance Graph]. These are sliding charts, so to see 'old' data you need to look at the other postings.

Click for a larger image

Note I thought I up-loaded this, but I only left it on the blog in draft mode, so I wrote this 10 days ago, but I did update the Google data.
.

URLs in Web Index

2010-06-30T12:50:00.002-04:00

I'm going to partially re-post a blog I wrote just a few weeks ago regarding web-pages included in Google's Index. I've only added a dozen pages in the last two months so the increase in the number of pages indexed has to be due the SEO changes being made to pre-existing pages already on the web. The Index History relates to an Engineering Portal on the web.

Index History:
6/30/10 = 1,504 indexed pages.
6/24/10 = 1,455 indexed pages
6/18/10 = 1,426 indexed pages
6/9/10 = 1,411 indexed pages.
5/31/10 = 1,400 indexed pages.
5/22/10 = 1,394 indexed pages.
4/7/10 = 1,309 indexed pages.
3/27/10 = 1,322 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/19/09 = 1,481 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/13/08 = 1,318 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]

That's not to bad, 12 new pages added, but 100 more pages indexed by Google.

Does the increase in indexed pages imply that all of a sudden the site will start receiving a great many more site visitors, not really. But it does mean that the newly indexed pages will show up in a Google search for that topic, maybe not first in the list but at least they will show up now.

No Page Rank; Company index 'M'.

I think I'll run a new site map later tonight, once the traffic slows down. I'll get those dozen or so new pages included, and remove a few FAQ pages that have been de-linked over the last few weeks. I did have a few pages that are not being used but still had links pointing to them, but Google dropped them from the index long ago ~ time to removed the link and orphan the pages.
I'll add a comment to this post once Google has time to read the new sitemap.

Graphic; Number of visits to the web site 1/1/10 to 6/29/10 [mid-year update].
Year-to-date = 17.48% increase in visits over the same time period last year [192,858 more visits].

Web Page Hits per Hour

2010-06-28T03:00:00.001-04:00

Here's one more graphic from the FAQ section of the web site. This one shows Page Visits by hour of the day.

Visits by Hour, May 2010

Comparing Site Vists

2010-06-27T23:19:00.000-04:00

I figured I would take another look at how the site is doing compared to last year. As of last week the site is still getting 10% more site visits than the same week last year.

Over all the web site is still getting more than 17% more web visits year-to-date, down 1% from 3 weeks ago. The first week of June had the lowest increase with only 6% more visits to the site. The largest increase in visits occurred on the last week in Jan with a 26% increase.

Over all the site is showing a 15% increase over 2008 visits, and about a 14% increase over 2007.

The graph compares web visits for 2010 and 2009 ~ by week.

Page-views [not shown] are down 4%, year to date over last year.

FAQ-Incoming-Linked-Sites

2010-06-19T09:14:00.001-04:00

I'm up-loading a graphic from the site to reduce both the size of the graphic that gets loaded and a separate DNS look-up that is required to load the graphic. The graphic is of Linked-sites, or sites linking to interfacebus.com from external sites. The graphic was stored out on Google Picasa, and not on the server, which required the extra DNS look-up.

So the page that held the graphic was deleted and a link pointing to this blog posting added to the pages that pointed to the old page. The point was to reduce that page from maybe 12k of html text to zero, delete the external look-up for the 100k graphic and reduce the over-all load time for the site.

Last month I did the same thing to 2 or 3 other FAQ pages to reduce the over-all loading time of the site. Remember Google rank page loading time as well as just key words.

Pages Crawled Per Day

2010-06-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

Crawl Stats;

Looks like Google is finally slowing down checking my Engineering Site. After 2 months of heavy Googlebot activity the spider seems to be taking a break, which is good. There's really no reason Google should be reading 2,000 pages a-day. The numbers shown in the graph are High number of pages, Average number and low number of pages spidered each day.

HTML Suggestions;

I finally got down to the point that Google does not have an suggestions of fixing any meta-tags. It seems like there were a few duplicate pages that were unused that I never fixed ~ so they may have been de-listed.Here is what Google has to say;
"We didn't detect any content issues with your site. As we crawl your site, we check it to detect any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users."

Sitemaps;

1,653 URLs submitted, 1,426 URLs Indexed.

Speed Performance Overview

2010-06-16T19:59:00.000-04:00

Just a quick up-date to show the latest graph on site download time, or site performance. Google now indicates an average download time of 2.8 seconds, which is faster than 51% of internet sites. This is down from 3.7 seconds in the last posting. The previous posting was Web Site Performance, 4/11/10.

Website Health Check

2010-06-12T13:59:00.002-04:00

Because of the drop in web visits this month, which is common for June, I figured I would compare the number of visits this year to last.
interfacebus.com Stats:

So there's an 11.78% increase in sites visits between June of 2009 and 2010.
June 2009; 63,814 visits
June 2010; 71,334 visits

The year to date difference is even better, with an 18.15% increase in visits
1/1 - 6/10 2009 = 994,854 visits
1/1 - 6/10 2010 = 1,175,422 visits

interfacebus [Google Sites] Stats:
Year to date for my Google Sites pages have a 104.56% increase in visits
1/1 - 6/10 2009 = 3,223 visits
1/1 - 6/10 2010 = 6,593 visits

Serialphy.com Stats:
Year to date for my serialphy pages have a 33.93% increase in visits
1/1 - 6/10 2009 = 1,441 visits
1/1 - 6/10 2010 = 1,930 visits

Knol pages [Google Knol] Stats:
Year to date for my Knol Site pages have a 42.9% increase in visits
1/1 - 6/10 2009 = 3,481 visits
1/1 - 6/10 2010 = 4,974 visits

Blogs [This blog and the other] Stats:
Year to date for my Blog pages have a 104.7% increase in visits
1/1 - 6/10 2009 = 3,679 visits
1/1 - 6/10 2010 = 7,532 visits

I guess I have to conclude the health of the sites is good!

Why You Should Blog

2010-06-11T17:57:00.002-04:00

At first I figured I was going to just insert a reminder post about some of the reasons a web master should also run a blog. But, as I was reviewing posts looking for the last relevant posting I found some disturbing data as it relates to the rest of this blog post. I'll address that data at the end of the post, with a comment plus a few related early blog posts.

The numbers below represent visits to the Engineering Site from this blog over the last thirty days.
The date represent when the blog posts were written with the number of visits from those posts.
The number of visits from blogger represent 84 visits from 15 different pages off blogger [although they are just shown by year of post].
The point of this post is to show that even after years of writing a blog posting, it still gets visits and provides referring hits to interfacebus.com. [Why Blog; Sep 12 2007]

Referral visits from Blogger [blogspot]
by page generation date:

42 referrals from 2010 posts
0 referrals from 2009 posts
3 referrals from 2008 posts
15 referrals from 2007 posts
10 referrals from 2006 posts
14 referrals from 2005 posts

The other blog site which only shows new pages included on the engineering site brings in even more traffic.
But in the last thirty days that blog sent over 82 referring visits from 26 different blog posts.
I did notice a spike in visits yesterday which has me wondering why.

I should note that this blog had 771 page views over the last thirty days, while the 'what's new blog' only received 354 page views.
That's page views in these blogs not sending traffic to the main site which is discussed about in this blog posting.
However you can read these blogs from a newsfeed, but these numbers don't reflect that.

The graphic shows incoming visits to the Engineering Site from these blogs over the last four years. Looks like there's been a steady decline in visits from mid last year. The middle of last year I stared a newsfeed, then near the end of last year I removed some permanent links from this blog that pointed to the web site. Now the newsfeed carries all these same posts, but if some one clicks over to the web site it doesn't appear to come from this blog.

Google Caffeine and Indexing

2010-06-10T02:05:00.000-04:00

So Google came out with a new indexing system which updates the Google index much faster than in previous years. The new indexing system is called Caffeine [Google Caffeine], and allows for a change in its index each night.

It was common knowledge that once every thirty days Goggle would shuffle it's indexed pages, so if you were number 2 in the search engine position [index] one month that same page would change position the next month. Some times the position would get a higher position, and sometime the index change would leave the page in a lower position.

However at the same time many of the new pages I generated would show up in the index the next day because I would blog about the new page address in the New Engineering Pages Blog. Google operates these blogs [blogspot] so they read or spider them all the time. Any new page mentioned in blogger gets noticed by Google much faster before it reads any external web site [I assume]. Before I started blogging I would wait 2 to 4 weeks before a page would get indexed, but after I started blogging any new page would get picked up within several hours.

So for Search Engine Optimization [SEO], blog about any new page you generate because it gets picked up much faster that waiting for the spider [Googlebot] to find it, and much faster than having to generate a new site map for each new page addition.

So what is Caffeine? Well it's Google changing your search engine position ever day instead of every month. However; because your page position might change ever day as it was displaced by one of my new pages, I'm not really sure I see the difference. However Google does indicate a recent drop in the number of my page that are being displayed in the search engine listing, or really the number of pages that are being clicked on.

So this graph depicts the the number of times my page is shown in the search engine results [blue] and the number of times somebody clicks on one of my pages [yellow] in the search results. A drop in click-through rate [yellow] in the last few days should indicate that although my pages are still showing up in the search results, they now appear lower down in the results ~ maybe page 2 of the results instead of page 1.
But at the same time Google Analytics reports that there has been no drop in visits, and I trust the Analytics report more than I trust the report from Google webmaster tools [graphic above].

If I run the above report for the term Can Bus I see no real reduction in the click through-rate.
While the graph shows all search queries [all search terms] that relate to my website.

Indexed URLs by Google

2010-06-09T09:55:00.000-04:00

I'm always watching how many of my pages are indexed in Google's search engine, and a few days ago it reached 1,411 pages indexed. Here's a few data points over the last few months [years];

6/9/10 = 1,411 indexed pages.
5/31/10 = 1,400 indexed pages.
5/22/10 = 1,394 indexed pages.
4/7/10 = 1,309 indexed pages.
3/27/10 = 1,322 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/19/09 = 1,481 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/13/08 = 1,318 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]

The number of pages most go up just after I add a sitemap, and then drop down a few weeks later after Google finishes reading them. However as I 'fix' the pages they slowly start to re-appear as indexed, but at a slower pace. Fixing a page is adding more data so it no longer appears as the page it was copied from.
No page rank; Component Manufacturers. Just one example of a page not indexed.....

I'm not going to show the graph but Google indicates that on average Google will spider 862 pages per day ~ every day. What is up with that, the site only has 1,600 pages? Google used 537MB of server bandwidth as the spider Googlebot down-loaded from the website.

Site views and page ranking

2010-06-01T09:02:00.001-04:00

So the numbers are in for last month. Site visits are down over the last month, but over-all page views have increased a bit. Now if the numbers follow the same yearly trend there should be an even bigger reduction in site visits next month. I think I'll wait until next month before I re-post the page visits graph, there's really no need to post the same graph every month.

After I noticed yesterday that a few more of my pages have been included into the Google Index, I figured I would try and find a few pages that are yet to be added. It didn't take to long to find a year old page with out a page rank. The links are Component page followed by the mention of the component in the 'whats new blog'.
How to Derate 2N4239 Transistor. [posted on 6/4/2009 When to Derate a Transistor]
How to Derate a 2N3743. [posted on 1/30/2009 Derate a BJT by Temperature]
How to Derate a 2N3485 Transistor. [posted on 2/12/2009 Recommendation on how to Derate a Transistor]
How to Derate a 2N4931 Transistor. [never posted in the blog].

I found these pages by looking at the report from Google Analytics, and clicking on a few pages that were getting almost no page views. None of these four pages have a Google page rank, and have only received a few page views this year. Of course re-posting their links here may not help these pages at all, but it may help them get re-spidered ~ as they were just up-dated.

Link Checking

2010-05-31T18:13:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note to indicate that the links on the engineering site have just been checked and verified. There were a few bad links, but not that many. I still have some sites to check within the next few days, but I need to give the web sites time to come back on-line.

The attached graphic shows the data generated by Xenu. It appears that at a minimum there were 99.29% good links on the site, and that number should increase as I check the rest on the remaining links in the report.

The last time I showed this report was in November 20 2009 as Xenu Report, Statistics for Managers. That report shows 99.25% good links, with a total number of URL links as 6950 URLs

Of course there is one day remaining in the month, but the site numbers look kind of low. Today should not be any different because the site never does well on holidays. This will be the lowest performing month of the year, still better than any month of any previous year. But I should be posting those numbers tomorrow, as my server counter does not up-date until about 5am.

Of course if you have off-page links on your site you should always check them to insure they point to a valid page address. I use a free link checking program called Xenu.

As a side note; the site visits so far this year have past all of the visits for the entire 2005 year.

Mezzanine Buses

2010-05-30T06:45:00.000-04:00

There are a great many Mezzanine buses, some more out-dated than others. Mezzanine cards are small form factor boards that reside as a daughter card on a VME or cPCI mother-board to name a few interfaces. Mezzanine cards to not directly interface to the main system backplane as does VME for example. Most of the Mezzanine interface on this site are represented by two separate pages; one page carries the particular board manufacturers and another page covers the description of the electrical interface and mechanical form factor.

The oldest of the current Mezzanine board formats on the market is the IP Card or Industry Pack I/O Modules. Basically a non-intelligent board format used in a number of systems, a bit dated at this point in time, but there are still Companies Producing IP Modules. Page views are almost down to zero for this board format, which seems odd as it was an I/O based module.

The M-Module which is just as old still receives a few page views, but there doesn't appear to be much support in Producing M-Module Cards.

The mezzanine board format that replaced the IP board was the PMC format, or PCI Mezzanine Card. The PMC board added a controller but still allowed for any required I/O, previously handled by the IP card. So there are still many Companies Producing PMC Boards. A variant of the PMC interface is the PMC-X format. Both of these board standards used the PCI bus as the electrical interface, so really they are somewhat out dated [PCI Card Manufacturers].

The follow-on to the PMC standard was the PPMC interface, or Processor PMC format. There are a few companies that Produce PPMC Boards which were true processor based cards, on a PCI bus. Another related was board format is the PTMC Interface, or Telcom PMC standard [still using the PCI electrical interface].

These are all open standards so the board specifications could be used on any carrier card, but some interfaces were designed specifically for the VME bus, others for the cPCI Interface, and still others for the AdvancedTCA Interface. The AMC Mezzanine card was designed to interface to the new ATCA standard, being relatively new there is a small but growing number of Companies Producing AMC Boards.

Additional mezzanine boards include FMC, and XMC standards.

Search Key Word vs. Search Key Phrase

2010-05-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

For a number of years now I've noticed that many of my pages do not do well in a Google search when a one word phrase is used. I've never been able to figure out why my pages do better with two or more key words rather than one key word, but I guess I can't show up first for every key word.

So one example is the search term VME, which would be a one-keyword search. The VME page shows up in the ninth position on the first page. When the phrase is changed to VME Bus, the page shows up in the forth position [same for VMEbus]. When I add another key phrase, VME Bus Pinout, the page shows up as the first listing on the first page. First listing for the key-words VME Backplane, and VME Chassis also. Hmm, looks like VME Connector places first too, in both a text and image search.

I'm using the VME Bus as an example, but I could have used any computer bus because the same thing happens. I just don't under stand how Google determines what page should show up first when only one key-word is used.

Yes I know the rules, those other pages must be using the key terms more often at the beginning of their article. I' don't know, my pages do show up but I would rather have them show up higher for a few one word searches. I guess I need to somehow optimize the VME interface page up that it shows better in a Google search, maybe rewrite some of the text.

Blog Comments change

2010-05-23T16:29:00.000-04:00

I made a change to how comments are added to a posting within this blog. Previously there was a 'Leave a Comment' line at the end of the posting. I think that text is gone now and replaced by a '# comments' which needs to be clicked on. So that text needs to be clicked, regardless of the number of current comments, it may say 0 comments. Now this only holds true if your on the main page or some archive page. If your within the posting than you will see the comments, if any, and a comment box.

So that's what I changed, I added the Comment Box to each posting. Now the comment box is within the blog post instead of on a pop-up page. However the comments are still moderated, as they always have been. Some people don't realize the comments need my approval before they get posted, because I see identical redundant comments come in.

Most of the comments in this blog are from me, because I use the comment field to up-date the blog postings. Also, like any other blogger I get comments that say very little but have a link embedded within the comment ~ I don't post those comments. Those comments are just spammers looking for a free link. Anyway it may be a few days before the links gets moderated and posted, or not.

Digital TV Reception

2010-05-21T18:14:00.002-04:00

I finally got around to playing with Digital Television [DTV] this week. At first I didn't have a DTV antenna so I just hooked up an old FM dipole antenna I had. The FM antenna worked pretty well, as I was getting around 11 stations [Digital TV Channels]. However there was some interference, or bad reception because a few of the stations would come and go. Any why I went ahead and purchased a Digital Antenna.

I purchased a Omni-Directional Flat Digital Antenna from Best Buy. The digital antenna is a FDTV2 made by Trek. I only just purchased the antenna yesterday so I can't speak to how low it will last, but it comes with a one year warranty.

The antenna was about $55 and was in around the mid price range. There may have been a few both above and below this cost, but never having purchased a DTV antenna I just went with something in the middle price range. No I didn't read any product reviews, it's an antenna, but it is an active antenna. So I take it the only thing that can go wrong would be the internal amplifier, or maybe the attached cable. Anyway I would recommend this antenna because it seems to pick all the stations its supposed to; however I have not tried any other digital antenna.

I was wondering how long the cable from the antenna to the TV could be, but the attached 5 foot coaxial cable answered that question for me [standard BNC connector]. The antenna cable is permanently affixed to the antenna. Although a BNC Barrel [Female-Female] connector could be added to extend the maximum cable length, I wouldn't recommend doing it with out testing first. The antenna itself may be wall mounted, table mounted [comes with a base], or mounted flat on any surface

The attached table is a graphic of the available digital stations in my area from the FCC, showing signal strength, Network Callsign, Virtual TV Channel, and the Frequency band. For many of those stations listed, there are three different channels. That tells me that the stations are transmitting digital TV, but not high definition TV. [a few HD Acronyms].

The attached map is the relative location of the DTV transmitters and the DTV receiver. Although only three antennas are shown to the north many of the antennas are over lapped, with only one antenna being located south of the receiver.
Click either picture to see a larger view.

Related blog postings; HDTV Spectrum,
The TV used with the antenna is a Westinghouse TX-47F430S, 1080p HDTV [with internal digital converter].

Visitor Demographics, Web Site

2010-05-20T09:14:00.001-04:00

Here is what Google Analytics has for the Engineering Site visitor demographics [year to date]. The graphic indicates visitors from the United States [US] only. Data is available for many other countries as well, but not all countries display this chart. There are also a number of additional tables of data that go along with graph, but there not as interesting.

Now I did get this chart from the Google Analytics, but it appears that the data was generated by Doubleclick [which Google purchased a year ago]. So I might assume that the data is not as good as if it really came from Google, because they track my visitors. However there are other sites that produce more or less the same data; but they use different methods of producing their data.

For example, Alexa produces some of the same graphs, but you would have to be using an Alexa tool-bar to be counted in their data. They indicate a small amount of Female visitors, while Doubleclick indicates none. Alexa also indicates many more visitors in the age range of 18-24, again doubleclick indicates zero visitors. I just looked at the Alexa data, but I do have a posting from 7/1/09 which shows what their charts look like [Alexa Demographics].

Quantcast also has some of the same data, but I'm not really sure how they get their information [see note below]. Here is another previous posting from 10/2/07 showing one of their charts [Quantcast data]. Their data is also different. I think it's so different I'll post their data to the right. The time ranges between the two sets of the charts are different, but I'm just working with what I have. Either way, the two graphs show how or what different companies collect and how they display the data.

The point is who do you believe, and why doesn't Google use their own data. I guess Google is using the data from doubleclick because they already had the program. Then why doesn't Google send over the right data, they know every thing about my web site. Then again how would Google know if a visitor was a man or woman ~ there most have been some kind of sigh-up with doubleclick?

Note: One method to generate information for Quantcast data is to add a small amount of code to your web page(s). For several months I had that code on my home page and a few other high traffic pages [out of 1,300 pages]. However I removed the code to increase page loading time. The real point is before I had added the code Quantcast had my monthly traffic at 9800 visitors, while after I added the code to those few pages the traffic went up to 39000 visitors. Currently it appears to be running around 22000, but that's not the point. How accurate is the data these sites provide.

Of course I don't care what my site's visitor demographics is, unless some company emailed and said they would only advertise if I had a particular kind of visitor ~ which has never happened.

I need to promote a few web pages that are getting no page views [less than 10 this year], sorry;
2N3867 Transistor derating curve............... 2N2944 Transistor derating curve.
2N6762 FET derating curve..................1N4454 Diode derating curve.
PCM Waveforms, IRIG.

Graphic: McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender in flight

Page De-listed and not found

2010-05-18T17:29:00.000-04:00

I was working on updating a page the other day and I did a Site Search for it, so I could see how it displayed in the Web Browser. Well guess what, the page did not come up in the Google Search bar I have on the site. Two other pages that pointed to it showed up, but not the page it-self.
The page in question shows a Derating Curve for a 2N3762 Transistor, UA Package. However the two pages that showed up in the listing were for a Temperature Derating Curve for 2N3765 Transistor and a list of PNP Transistor Derating Curves. So the assumption is that the page relating to the 2N3762 PNP Transistor was delisted. Now I noticed that there is another related page; the main 2N3762 Transistor Design page and the 2N3762 Transistor in a U4 package which also should have showed up in the search results.

Now if I put a Google Site Search on my Engineering web site, I would expect Google to search my site ~ that's the point of the search bar. What Google does on their own site is up to Google, but my pages should come up on my site.

I was also working on another page [IRIG PCM Waveforms] and I checked Google Analytics stats for that page and only a few page views showed up. So I again did a Google site search and that page does not show as listed either.

These pages exist on the site, but many people may not navigate to the correct page to see the data, they may just use the search engine. I assume they click away when the correct page does not show up in the search.

Attached picture; A-10 Thunderbolt II In-flight, US Air force [USAF].

Page Optimization SEO

2010-05-09T18:26:00.001-04:00

Just to follow up with the last posting regarding click-through rates from Google searches ~ I did look at a few of the Google search queries and worked on those related pages. Now I did not update the pages just to optimize them for the search engine. I used the list or my page in question and reviewed the web page to see if any additional work or data could be added to the page.

So in fact I did optimize several pages for the search engine, but only because I added more text to the page. I really just addressed page issues, if the page didn't require any work I left it alone. So I guess it was a good tool to use to find pages that need work. Well there are always many pages that need work, or maybe more detail, but there are always trade offs between what pages get up-dated.

Every Query in the list has a little star which I can high-lite so I'll know which keyword or query I've already worked. Of course there are a few thousand search terms in the list so it might take a little bit of time to work the entire list ~ like I'm going to do that.

Like any page up-date I make, I won't see any response or change in the page visits until the page gets spidered by GoogleBot [which could be a few weeks]. So that fact makes it hard to track page enhancements vs increased page views; as I made 14 page updates today, 30 pages yesterday and 40 pages the day before. What would I do keep a rolling list of page changes for 15 days until Google spidered them. Among other pages I updated include the 7 Segment Driver page and the 15 pin D-sub Connector page to name a few....

Oh, I added a comment to the previous post; I hadn't noticed but many of those numbers in the graph are the same [flat lines]. So the graph must be generalizing data, it's just not possible to have the same click-through rate each day.

Graphic: Iraqi T72 Tank Firing in the Desert [Soviet Designed Main Battle Tank].

Clickthrough Rate

2010-05-06T15:45:00.002-04:00

Over the last month or so I've been updating pages to display the new Google Search bar, primarily because it uses 1kB less html code. So far just over a thousand pages have received the up-grade with the new code. But what about all the other page metrics I have to worry about, maybe it's time to work on a few of those; as in:

Page Bounce Rate

Pages with low Pageviews

Pages with a high Exit Rate
And on and on; there's just so many different ways to measure how a page is doing on the internet.

One metric I don't look at that often is search engine Click-Through Rate, or the amount of times a page shows up in a Google search but is not clicked on. Now the search term used or the query could be any term as long as it causes my engineering website to show up in the results returned in a Google search.

Of the 6,091 queries, Google provides no data at all for the lower 4,500 searches. I assume because the page impressions are to low [a percentage] to track; however I really don't know. There are another 1000 queries that display an impression but no Clickthrough data, maybe because the clickthrough rate is below 1%. Because the first term with a clickthrough shows up with a 1% clickthrough rate; which would be the worst search term with any data. The 'worst' Google search term in the report is "DVI" which I assume relates to the page I have on the DVI interface. That DVI page shows up on the first page as #8 out of 32,500,000 results. The DVI search term causes my page to be displayed in the Google search results 6,600 times with only 58 people clicking on the link [over the last month].

So there are thousands more search terms with different impressions and click-through rates. For example the term 'Derating' had only 58 search impressions but 12 click-throughs. So the question is, should I work on pages that have no or low search impression or web pages with a low clickthrough rate? What-ever; working any page based on this data would be Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

Web Browser Usage

2010-05-05T01:52:00.002-04:00

I figured I would post which Web Browser people use to visit the web site [the Engineering site, not this blog].
Every now and again I see some news article about how one of the web browsers is doing. Normally the article just posts data for the year, as in how one browser increased by a few percent for the year. In most cases the data is centered around how Firefox gained a percentage as Internet Explorer dropped a percent. Maybe sometimes that Google Chrome increased a percentage as Internet Explorer dropped some amount.

The point is that this chart shows four years of web browser usage for this web site, and not just one year of data.

Chart Data
Explorer; Microsoft Internet Explorer [MS IE]
Firefox; Mozilla Firefox
Chrome; Google Chrome
Opera; Opera Software
Safari; Apple Safari

The two things to note about the graph is that it only covers 2010 up to 5/3/2010, and Google Chrome only started in 2009.

Incoming Visitor Patterns by Month

2010-05-04T08:21:00.000-04:00

At first when I saw my stats drop a bit last month I started to think my pages got re-shuffled in Google. Just because they do that ever month. I was also thinking about a few previous post relating to what Google thinks of my page loading times.

But now that I see the data for a full month, the trend appears normal. For the last five years the hits per month have been about the same for Feb and Apr [for the same year]. No they are not identical, but within a few thousand visits, the two months track each other.

Now it could be that more Engineering tasks start in March. Or maybe the jobs start in Jan but March is the month people start looking for parts and start designing the gear ~ I'm not really sure how I would ever know.

But if these trend lines continue I assume I'll see lower page visits for the next four months; although still higher than in previous years.

Taking note of a few pages added in Jan of this year
Power Line Filtering; Visits double each month [but it started at 13 visits]
Panel Mount LEDs; Visits dropped each month
Capacitor Networks; Visits going up a few hits a month
Resistor Networks; Visits are holding steady.
New page never do well the first few months any way.

Click on the graphic to the right to see Number of Visits/Month over the last five years.

Spider Crawl Data

2010-04-24T21:09:00.000-04:00

So I've been blogging about page speed, loading time, or down-load time and how Google rates web sites. Well what is up with Google's spider. Google Bot has been hitting my site pretty hard. Now as I look at the Crawl errors report I find 12 pages that Google indicates as 'unavailable' ~ maybe the server is getting over loaded.

Now I have to ask if Google is the one that's slowing down my site as they continually pull down page after page. AWSTATS indicates that Googlebot has used up 198.13MBytes of bandwidth so far this month. The Yahoo spider was the next worse offender with 125MB of bandwidth used.

Was this a Catch 22 situation? I was updating hundreds of pages to reduce down-load times by adding a new search bar. GoogleBot picked up on the page up-dates and tried to retrieve them all within a few days ultimately slowing down my server. What is up with that? It may well be that I'll have to wait a few weeks before the data comes back to normal.

I mean look at the change in the time it required to download a page; a low of 68mS all the way up to 1,608mS. And if that data is true then why does the site performance tab indicate a 3.7 second average load time while the crawl rate indicates a 186mS average load time [0.186 seconds] ~ that's a pretty big difference..... I can only conclude that the page takes .186 seconds to download, but the Java Script for Google Analytics and any pic file from Google Picasa take up the rest of the time.

AMDs 6-Core Processor

2010-04-23T08:44:00.001-04:00

Did I just read an article saying AMD would come out with a new six-core processor for a mere $200. I think it may be time to up-grade my PC and get a new one. What; I'll have to upgrade to the new MS OS, what ever that is. I'll have to go out and find out what people are saying about OS7 [Windows 7]

Windows 7

-- Improved performance with multi-core processors
-- Improved boot performance
-- Does not yet support USB 3.0 [available with SP1 late 2010]
Desktop
-- No USB 3.0 support yet [that I found]
-- PCI Express 3.0 not yet been released [later this year]
-- Serial ATA revision 3.0 [no products found yet]
-- DDR3 [mainstream support]
Ok I guess this blog posting is pointless. I would like the 6-core processor, but not at any cost. My office applications wouldn't even really see any advantage any way. But more importantly I find no support for USB 3.0 or Serial ATA version 3.0. I also don't want Windows 7 before the first service pack.

So why purchase a PC that will be out-of-date 6 months after I get it. By next year all USB drives will be USB 3.0. I'm not sure if I would wait for PCIe 3.0 support, I'd be waiting another year. So no new PC for me this year, I'd just end up giving it away 6 months later.

I did note that the AMD3 socket processor style is out. ~
Six core AMD Processors; Phenom II X6 1055T and Phenom II X6 1090T

Web Site Performance

2010-04-22T15:49:00.000-04:00

I've got a few more weeks of data from Google's Site Performance. The data seems to indicate that the site speed is about the same it was in the last posting. However now Google indicates I'm 7% slower, so I have to assume that the other sites being used as a comparison are also getting faster? Because it still indicates 3.7 seconds to download a page.

Their text; "On average, pages in your site take 3.7 seconds to load (updated on Apr 20, 2010). This is slower than 62% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.".

So far 833 pages have received the newer smaller html code for Google's Search Bar, but I guess the 1k of text reduction per page doesn't seem to be helping any. Looks like this is a scrolling graph, as Nov has fallen off the end and replaced by newer data in Apr. The Page Speed suggestions do not seem to be updating, as Google still shows the pages and suggestions as before.

Web SIte Speed Enhancments

2010-04-15T13:37:00.001-04:00

So to follow up with 3 of the last four postings regarding page downloading times and so on. I'll go ahead and detail a few of the things I've been doing to the web site to speed up down-load times. Or really to decrease page down-load times, depending on the page that received a change or not. I really can't make a single change that would effect the entire web site, each page is completely separate from another page.

So the new Google search bar is now on 684 pages. Each page that gets the new search code sees a reduction in html code or text of 1,480 characters [1,480 bytes] ~ I started replacing the search bar code a few days before I posted about it with Custom Search Bar. Just 1k Byte may not sound like a lot of data, but in fact it is when you consider how often these pages are down loaded, perhaps 15,000 page requests per day. It's a big saving on server bandwidth [over time] and Google sees the page as 1K smaller too, which was the point. People really pay for server bandwidth by the month so my reduction would be 400,000 pages x 1,480 Bytes, once all the pages get switched over. The second benefit is that the old search code from Google used an Engineering site logo which Google saw as another DNS look up that was a drain on the page loading time [logo stored off-site]. So this change saves the site 1 DNS look up and 1KB per page.

Using data from Feedburner [the blog feed] and Adsense [advertiser] I determined that there were not that many people reading the blog as a news feed. Plus the news feed was not generating any revenue, so I decided to remove the feedburner banners from the web site. Right, why publicize; the banners take up space, slow the page down and produce no income from the site. In addition the banners required 663 characters of html text and required an additional DNS look-up. The down side is that the banners were only on about 6 pages, so the savings is small, but those 6 pages should make the entire site appear faster [to a small degree].

Five gif files have been removed from the site, two were reinserted into this blog. The attached graphic shows monthly traffic to the web site for 2009. In addition to the page losing the graphic and seeing the size reduction this blog gets a link from the web site indicating the new location of the graphic. The 5 pages also no longer require another DNS look-up because the graphics were out on Google Picasa. Now the FAQ pages never received that many hits and the gif's were out on Picasa so my server sees no change. However Google will see the loss of a DNS look-up and the disappearance of five 80K Byte pic files.

In addition to removing those pic files I also reduced the size of another 14 gif files, saving between 20 and 30K Bytes per file. Yet another small change, but these files were local so the server will also see a reduction.

Any single change is small but the aggregate speed increase to the web site should help. I'll find out in a few weeks when Google up-dates the Site Performance report again. It's hard to tell, but this is Search Engine Optimization [SEO] because Google uses down-load time as part of its Page Rank algorithm.

Google now ranks pages by Speed

2010-04-14T04:03:00.000-04:00

Seems hard to believe, but they do indicate that one of the 200 different criteria for Page Rank is page loading time. Recall that just a few posts ago I indicated that their own speed rating was complaining about their own Google products [Web Site Speed Performance] being used on my pages. Even back in 2007 I had complained about the (then new) W3C strict coding style with the Physical Page Size post, as even the smallest function required a large amount of coding.

Anyway most of the comments (including mine) to Google's blog posting were negative, and for good reason. How do you trade off page content with page loading speed. Many people mentioned Google Analytics code [tracking] or Adsense code [ads] as issues with loading time. However there were two comments I would like to bring over from two different posters [each from a different Google Blog];

"Doesn't this punish the small operator who has less control over their, usually shared, hosting? Or those in countries that have lesser infrastructure? At the same time, allowing bigger business to throw money at the speed problem and gain a better ranking?"

"With the recent court ruling with the FCC vs. Comcast speed might be tiered or throttled in the future. Is that a concern?"

Anyway it's already been said on those blogs. It's the Gmail Buzz debacle 1 month later, I just don't get it ~ as I remove Google product the rest of the night.

The attached graphic is daily stats for the engineering website for March 2010 [generated by AWSTATS]. Nice to look at, but the real reason it's here is because it was just deleted from my site ~ replaced with a link to this posting. It was a large graphic that required an additional DNS look-up [because it was located out on Google Picasa]. The next few posts will also contain one of these FAQ pics as they are moved off the site to increase the speed of those pages. The pics also get dumped from Picasa.

Blogging and Feed Stats

2010-04-05T15:51:00.000-04:00

So it's been awhile sense I spoke about the benefits of blogging, so it must be time to address the issue again.

Much of this blog deals with web master stuff, SEO techniques and web analytics. But almost any topic is fair game.

The first reason is to bring in traffic to your web site [Engineering Buses]. This particular blog brings in 2 or 3 visitors a day to the web site. Sixty five percent of that incoming traffic is from new visitors. Now that may not sound like a lot of people, but it's still new traffic from people that may not have otherwise found my web site. So in a sense a blog is like free advertising. The other blog which only relates to new page additions to the web site brings in twice the number of visitors.

The second reason, at least for me, is that I can blog about any topic. So I can cover topics I would not otherwise address. Remember each blog posting is just like a web page, so I can blog and generate a new web page about any topic which wouldn't fit or relate to the web site. There are currently 528 posting in this blog and another 212 posting in the other blog ~ 740 additional web pages.

Of course you don't even have to visit the blog, you can read it as a blog feed. The attached graphic is the blog feed stats from people reading the feed generated by feedburner. You can access the feed by clicking on the rotating Feeds banner to the left.

Web Site Speed Performance

2010-04-03T00:44:00.001-04:00

I figured I would follow yesterdays posting regarding adding the new, smaller, script for the Google search bar with how Google sees my site when down-loading. Remember their web spider, GoogleBot, reads 500 of my pages every day. See a previous blog posting on Special crawl setting. So Google would know if my server was slow or not.

Here is what Google had to say; "Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 3.7 seconds to load (updated on Mar 26, 2010). This is slower than 55% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points). The chart above shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times."

Google Webmaster Tools gives a lot of page examples and what I could do to speed them up.
Their first suggestion is to 'Enable qzip compression' to reduce the page size. That's a nice idea but it makes working on the page a bit hard. Why don't I just save the 2k and continue to replace the Google search bar. I mean I am careful about up-loading large graphic files. In fact for pic files that can't be reduce, get uploaded to GoogleSites, and I only use a link to the file.

Their second suggestion is to 'Minimize DNS lookups', well guess what the DNS lookups are being used to access Google products. There are three common look-ups that they are referring to.
A logo used with the old Google search bar, which gets removed as the new search bar replaces it.
The Google Analytics code that I use as the site counter, provided by Google.
Finally, Google is complaining about pic files that I'm storing on Google Picasa that it has to down load. I just posted about Google Picasa off-line the other day too and how I used Picasa to save bandwidth.

So there are three of the four things Google says is slowing down my site, and there all Google products, does that make any sense. The fourth compression issue may not be an issue at all if the rest of the Google code on my page was a tad bit smaller. For example the new search bar code that is much smaller than it's been over the last five years. The adsense code also got smaller a few years ago, but could also be smaller.

Custom Search Bar

2010-04-02T11:33:00.000-04:00

I started to add a new Google search bar to the web site. The new version of the search bar replaces the current one already used on the site. I'm not really sure when Google came out with the new code. I'm also not real keen with the reduction in options, but that's another story.

The code for the search bar is only 430 characters, while the current version used contained 1,910 characters. That's a reduction of 1,480 characters per html page [depending on the search bar used]. So a character is one byte of text, or 8 bits of data. Eight bits x 1,480 bytes = 11,840 bits per page ~ that's the size of a pic file.
Say 10,000 page views a day x 11,000 bits, that's 110M Bytes per day.

Now I've only started to change the search bar on a few pages so far, so I'll be changing the code the rest of the year. The pages with the search bar at the top center of the page keep the same location. While the Dictionary style pages with a side bar will have their search bar moved up to the top of the side bar. Although you should keep the search bar in the same place for all your pages so people can't find it. These pages are having it moved to the top, just to the right.

I may be saving 110MB of bandwidth/day, but the pages are getting larger as the site grows. So in reality I will not see any reduction in bandwidth, maybe just keeping the bandwidth around the 13G Byte number. Take note of the last posting to see the increase in bandwidth over the last month. Remember it's nice to load up a page with graphics or what ever but keep your visitors in mind and keep the page-loading time down. Otherwise you my have people clicking away because the page takes to long to load.

Today I'll add the new search bar to the few dozen pages that get down-loaded the most, that way I'll see an immediate reduction in bandwidth. The other pages can wait until they need some other up-date.
Graphic; US Coast Guard HH-65C helicopters.

SEO stuff really work

2010-04-01T10:33:00.003-04:00

The numbers are in from last month, so I guess I should post them. The numbers seems to be on the increase, more than I figured. Although I can always predict the out-come based on the average numbers ~ maybe 10,000 visits per day, and 5,000 on the week-ends. However I did not expect to see the large jump in page views, which is finally up to the numbers back in 2006. I guess the trick now is to keep the numbers up there~

How to read the data:

Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 148,000 [in the graph] but really equates to 14G Bytes as the numbers were changed to fit the graph. I track bandwidth just to make sure the server does not see a heavy load.

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.

Another way to see the same data, as site visits, or number of visits ~ so a comparison can be made year over year. This chart makes it easy to see that site visits are higher than any other month and any previous year.
2005 was the year I started to follow Search Engine Optimization [SEO] techniques. I guess the SEO stuff really works.

Web Visits vs NATO Member Countries

2010-03-30T14:01:00.000-04:00

I wanted to show the relative increase in site visitors this year. So I picked year to date numbers compared to the same time interval last year. I also wanted to show a few random countries, so I used NATO Member Countries.

Currently March numbers are the highest ever of any other month, and there are still two days left. The first day of next month I'll show the standard bar graph of visitor status, or what ever I put up. But I wanted to detail something different before hand, another view of some of the data.

The over-all site is up about 20% over last year; however some of the countries listed below may show a higher or lower increase. None of the countries listed had a decrease in visitors to the web site [Engineering Data].

Now none of the [22] new pages generated this year are getting any web visits [yet]. So the increase in site visitors must be due to new pages added last year, or additions made to existing pages already residing on the web site. Maybe a few posts back I detailed how poorly the new page additions were doing.

NATO member states:
Albania; 27% increase
Belgium; 16% increase
Bulgaria; 35% increase
Canada; 22% increase
Croatia; 57% increase
Czech Rep; 32% increase
Denmark; 11% increase
Estonia; 52% increase
France; 24% increase
Germany; 24% increase
Greece; 25% increase
Hungary; 15% increase
Iceland; 6% increase
Italy; 19% increase
Latvia; 47% increase
Lithuania; 45% increase
Luxembourg; 3% increase
Netherlands; 7% increase
Norway; 27% increase
Poland; 17% increase
Portugal; 31% increase
Romania; 27% increase
Slovakia; 55% increase
Slovenia; 42% increase
Spain; 13% increase
Turkey; 17% increase
United Kingdom; 17% increase
United States; 11% increase

Now to be fair there have been some countries that show a decrease in site visits; for example, the 1 hit from the Vatican City did not return again this year. ~ this may appear to be a long posting, but it's just the list. I guess I forgot NATO started letting the eastern-block countries in for membership.

Just for the record, I just posted a comment to a blog post regarding Alexa data. Alexa indicates 11.1% of my site traffic is from Iran, while Google Analytics [site counter] indicates 0.43%. The data above is from Google Analytics, not some third party site.
Graphic; Flight of a NATO AWACS and three F16 fighters. Open Source. [public domain].
Graphic; Map of NATO countries and EU members. Open Source. [public domain].

Picasa Web Albums

2010-03-29T16:57:00.001-04:00

So it would appear that Google's Picasa Web Albums is off-line, and I'm not really sure how long they've been down. The web site [Engineering Portal] uses a lot of grapics and pic files, but not all of them are local to my server. I off-load some of them to Picasa to keep the server bandwidth down, which runs around 13G Bytes a month. Right, if someone else is serving the picture files then my bandwidth is not effected.

It's hard to say how many pic files reside on my server, as they could still reside in one of my directories but not used any more. So the count is an estimate but it would appear there are 687 picture files local to my server [give or a take]. Picasa on the other hand is serving another 919 graphic files [or not]. Because it appears that currently there are over 900 pic files not showing up on the web site.

So is it a good idea to up-load your files to another server? Well if your doing it to shows friends, sure. But what about if your trying to run a business? I guess I don't have an answer, but I am saving on my bandwidth. It's not saving me any money because my bandwidth limit is much higher than 13GB. What I am saving, or enhancing, is page load-time [I hope]. If the page is downloaded from my server and a pic file is downloaded from Picaca the visitor should see the page render faster. Or what if the files were on my server, what would be the bandwidth then?
Maybe a standard graphic file is 10 to 20K, and there are over 360,000 page views a month [over 380,000 page views this month]. That seems like a lot of down-loading [saved]......

So I see that the graphics are down in blogger as well [this blog]. I guess that makes sense because Google stores the blog graphics in Picasa too. I was going to attach a graphic showing server bandwidth vs page views, so that will have to wait. I'll add a link to this posing as a comment a bit later [SEO Techniques]. And it seems like just a few days ago the web site was off-line for a few hours too.

Oh, SEO stuff; the website link 'Engineering Portal' points to the normal site, I'm just using a different term to describe it ~ for the search engines. To try and insure the words are assigned to my home page , or related to...

Site has been assigned special crawl rate settings

2010-03-27T13:12:00.000-04:00

So I just checked Google Web Master Tools to see how the site was doing [looking for any issues]. Plus I had just up-loaded a new xml sitemap. The last update of the xml site-map was in December, so this new one covers the 20 odd pages added in the last few months.

Anyway, because the site was off-line for a few hours the other day, I checked the crawl rate. I no longer have the option of changing the Google crawl rate [for Googlebot]. Instead of a crawl faster or crawl slower selection I see this message;
Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.

Under the Crawl errors page I don't see any issues. There are 16 pages not found, but those are all mis-spelled page addresses from other web sites [incoming links], which I can't do any thing about. So I check how GoogleBot is crawling the Engineering web site, all looks well. In fact it seems that over the last three years around 500 pages are crawled per day. Here is the site crawl rate history over the last few years [Engineering Blog with a search term of Crawl]. So what is the deal and what does Special Crawl Rate mean?

I tried a Google web search for the terms 'assigned special crawl rate' and I get a Google News group with dozens of people asking the same thing. Well News-Groups are not that great a place to get information, only because so many people post a reply, just to post with out ever answering the question. Some people said it was for large sites, others replied that they had a small site. Then people would say that's why 1000's of their pages are not indexed [which is different all together].

So I can't answer the question of why your site has been assigned a special crawl rate, because I don't know why my site received it. But I can say that at least for my site, there has been no change in the crawl rate ~ all the way back to 2007. Click the crawl rate graphic for a larger image for year-to-date crawl rates.

I could add to that and say my site does not even require a sitemap, any new page gets spidered with in about a month. Of course this blog gets spidered today, remember blogger is owned by Google. Oh if I didn't already say Google indicates 1,653 urls submitted in the xml sitemap, with 1,322 urls indexed.

Attached graphic; Google Crawl Rate for January 2010 to March 2010.

The Web Site is Off-Line

2010-03-22T18:33:00.002-04:00

The web site [Engineering Electronics] is down for about an hour now and I can't get any work done, so I figured I would go ahead and get a blog post in. The web site does not go down that often, but I'm never happy when it does. I don't make any money when the site is off line and I could always be losing new visitors ~ not good.

I should call, but I'm sure they will just say; we know its off-line and we're working on it. A few years back I did call and complained after the site was down most of a day. I remember asking how they arrive at their up-time number ~ You know the 99.999% on-line guarantee [that number]. I don't remember getting a response to my question, and the guarantee is useless as well. You have to go into your site stats and prove to the hosting company the site was off-line ~ like they don't already know. If I had more confidence in my cable connection I'd get my own server and do the hosting myself.

Anyway I've added a few new pages over the last week, keeping the site-map updated each time. The site is still doing better than last year, at around a 20% increase in site visits. Pageviews on the other hand are only around 15% higher, but there still higher. This same period last year the site had 922,867 page-views, while this year the site has received 1,063,542 page views. Really the pages-per-visit are down 4%, but because of the increase in traffic the other numbers are still up.

Wait a minute, a page just opened up, it may be trying to come back on line? Maybe I lost about 500 web visits, depending on how long it was really off-line. When the stats come in at 5:30 am I would guess I will not be seeing a 10,000 visit day [which is almost the norm now].....

Sitemap Generation

2010-03-17T00:23:00.000-04:00

I updated the html sitemap for interfacebus.com. This is the first update since the interfacebus-sitemap was up-loaded on 12/19/09. So I added in the last 22 web pages generated over the last few months, and removed a few more duplicate entries left over from when the page was generated.

I also went ahead and ran Xenu tonight to check for bad links. Looks like we have 99.17% good links out of 7,396 links. Seems I my have had about 10 bad links listed [which I have already fixed], I assume the other web sites will come back on line in a few hours ~ which is when I'll recheck them.

I'll go ahead and run the xml site-map generator over the week end. So the 22 odd new pages get included in that file and I can re-upload that file to Google. The last time the xml sitemap was generated was around 12/19/09 too.

Graphic; KC-135 Stratotanker Cockpit Instrument Panel [USAF Tanker].

PageViews performance

2010-03-13T14:26:00.000-05:00

Yep I went out and looked at the performance of the new pages that have been generated so far this year. In most cases the page views are very low, maybe one or two a day or no views at all.

I opened three or four of the different pages and added a bit more text when possible. But a number of these pages were generated based on a graphic. So either the text is already embedded in the picture or the graphic doesn't really require any additional text. So I'm kind of stuck, the pages are un-fixable there's really nothing wrong with them. Except for the fact that the page bring in zero traffic.

Now I know I need text on a page to bring in traffic from the search engines. It's standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] stuff, day one. But these pages were generated around a graphic file, little text required. Maybe I should stop generating a new page just because I have a picture file I want to use. Still I'm not even getting hits from people already on the site [engineering], nor am I getting any traffic from people doing an image search.

The question is what to do? Some of these pages were generated 3 months ago and have only seen a dozen hits.
1. Well I added some additional text to a few of the pages.
2. I also commented on a few of the Blog pages that added them. I always comment on my own postings, to indicate updates or changes in the original posting. Of course the comment enhances the blog page, because more text is added. Remember a blog post is also a web page.
3. Then there is this blog posting, with links to the pages that need help.

Now I talked about this same issue last December [New Page Generation and Page Views], only how new pages did over the entire year. Normally I never care about a page until it's at least 3 months old, which some of these are. But these page views are so low there's just no getting around the fact that they most have some kind of issue.

Panel Mount LED. Holds a graphic of a few LEDs. Added 1/7/10, zero page rank
Capacitor Networks. Graphics and a bit of text. Added 1/15/10, zero page rank
Via Stubs in PCBs. Definition of a Via Stub. Added 1/17/10, zero page rank
Jumper Headers. Holds a graphic of some jumpers. Added 12/31/09, zero page rank
These pages have only received between a dozen and 2 dozen page views so far, subtract a few because of me. Oh and page rank doesn't mean any thing, but it wouldn't hurt if they get one soon. Of course there are more pages in the same boat, but why fill the blog post with a bunch of page links.

Why are my earnings low

2010-03-02T19:49:00.000-05:00

I figured it's been more than a week so it's time for a posting. I only wish I had a topic.
But when in doubt post how the page views are doing.

What I find interesting is that page views are up over the last six months, both unique visitors and total visitors. In fact not only are page views higher on a per month basis, but over the last several months they are the highest numbers ever for any month. However the problem is that earnings for the site are stable, flat, or altogether boring..... Sure I've seen revenue increases for a day or a week, but nothing long term. I have not seen a steady increase in earnings which would track with the increase in visits.

Yea I could move ads or change ad formats, which I do. But I'm really always working on new content, and when I do move an ad it's to make the page look better and not to make more money.

The attached graph shows total visitors per month, which accounts for unique visitors and re-counts them if they return. So if a person visits the site they become a unique visitor. If that person returns during the same month that visit gets counted again as another visit [per the graph]. Each time a person visits the site and views a page, that gets counted as a page view. Normally people will view more than one page when they visit. So the number of visitors will be less because that would account for less pages that might be seen. So you visit the site [unique visitor], you come back and your a re-counted visitor, and every page is counted as a page view. Then the chart shows a number higher than unique visits, but lower total page views.

err, I was watching Donnie Darko while typing, so forgive the typo's.

Toyota's Blackbox and OBD

2010-02-16T18:34:00.000-05:00

I'm reading The Wall Street Journal yesterday and I see this article about an issue relating to reading the Blackbox in Toyota vehicles. Now it doesn't really say why people can't read the blackbox data but it most either be because there is no published literature on how to read the data or that the data is encrypted. I would assume the information in the blackbox is encrypted otherwise somebody would have hacked it by now. Of course there is always that privacy issue about giving out automotive data without the owners consent.

Anyway I always assumed that the data in the black box was as easy to obtain as the data on the OBD interface. Well maybe not that easy but along the same lines as reading any OBD codes as long as the user had the correct scanner, the right software and knew what the data represented. OBD supplies trouble codes from the engine indicating emission problems and other faults. [OBD Description].

So the OnBoard Diagnostics [OBD] interface has been required on US cars since 1996, or if your lived in California since 1988 ~ here's a little OBD History.While I gather the blackbox [Event Data Recorder] is that part of the system that records things like over-revving the engine, or things people would rather not tell a car dealer. Even worse that the Data Recorder could indicate that the driver was speeding just before an accident. I would still think the info is retrievable, or why record it.

In some way the blackbox data must be separate from the vehicle trouble codes that are readable as required by law. Is there one uC to handle the blackbox and another computer for the OBD interface? It was also my impression that the government was in the process of standardizing the data from the blackbox, which implies that it is retrievable.

I'm certainly no automotive expert, just an engineer that tracks the electrical requirements of different interfaces. Ok, the last time I worked on a car was in the seventies which is long before cars had computers.

Is this data available on the OBD connector, on the CANbus portion of the interface or is this a completely different interface on another connector and does it vary by manufacturer. At any rate I was just a little suppressed by the fact that it's so hard to get at the data.

The correct term for the Blackbox is Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorder [MVEDR].

New Features in Google Analytics

2010-02-11T12:02:00.002-05:00

Following last November's post concerning new reports in Google Analytics [Google Analytics Recommended]. I just noticed another new report as a sub-heading under Visitors, for Mobile Devices and Mobile Carriers. I'm not really sure how long the reports have been available; however I did find some one's blog posting that the report came out in December. But the blog post also indicates that the 'Intelligence' reports also came out in Dec, except I found mine in Nov, so maybe it was a slow roll-out to users.

At any rate I found the report on Mobile Device users interesting because it shows the [Engineering] site getting more visits than I would have guessed coming in on cell phones. There have been 1,679 visits so far this year, say around 40 visits per day. I always figured most engineers would be sitting next to a computer no matter what they were doing. Maybe in the field there is no internet access so that leaves a wireless cell phone.

Now this number is still to low to force me to re-code for mobile users, 40 visits only amount to about 7 minutes of site usage over a 24 hour period. These days the page may be expanded or reduced on the screen, unlike a few years ago when a page had to be coded correctly to be seen on a small screen.

The sampled data from Analytics only goes back to November of 2009, but there has been an increase in phone usage over that time. Around 200 visits per week back in Nov. and around 280 per week for last month. So the trend is increasing.....

~ On a side note Internet Explorer is down another 3% this year [to date], with Google Chrome increasing by 3%.

Graphic: Google Analytics; Mobile Devices Report, by Operating Systems.

Google Buzz for Gmail

2010-02-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

So I signed into Gmail Buzz today, looks the same to me.
But I really use Gmail for my website business so I don't do a lot of chatting.
Most of my incoming mail is from companies wanting to be listed on the web site [Buses], of course the rest are just personal emails.

Any way I didn't see a lot of new options to select from, other than to share Picasa photos or blogs...
I guess I'll have to wait till I get into a chat with someone before I can see the real changes. However the odds of me chatting with anyone are pretty slim.

I just checked my other Gmail account and that mail account is not offering me a chance to upgrade to Buzz ~ I assume this is an up-grade.

I see, Google Buzz opens up the 'social web' to Gmail, at least that's what the Google Blog says. Unfortunately I don't really use Gmail to socialize I use it as a tool to get my work done on the internet.

Note that I used the term 'Buses' to link to my web-site because [Google] Webmaster Tools indicated that this particular key word was rated a bit low in significance in key words found on my site.

Credit Card Problems

2010-02-10T00:29:00.002-05:00

So what else is new.

I got a letter in the mail yesterday, ... your credit card information has been compromised ~ by a third party .....
Your account has been closed and we will issue you a new account number.

Well not really, I can still use the card for two weeks, but when I called the 'phone computer' it didn't recognize me as a valid account [canceled ?]. When the card company did answer the phone they gave me an account number I don't have [which would be the new one?]. I had to explain that I wanted to talk about a particular account number, which I assume was not the top message on his computer.

So we went around a bit, I wanted to know who compromised my account, and he kept telling me he was protecting me by giving me a new account number.
Ok, who compromised my account?
Well we can't give out that information, have I answered all of your questions?
No! who compromised my account? You just started a new account which will lower my credit rating, who caused that?
Well we do that for a number of reasons; fraud, mis-charging ...... [who cares].
What ever, every time I stopped talking I got the canned speak about 'suspicious transactions' [or what ever he said].

Two minutes into the conversation I could tell that the guy was 20, but I gave him a few chances to answer my question. Of course he doesn't care if he answers my question or not as long as I answer yes to his question ~ that he answered all my questions [he asked me three times].

After a couple of minutes I gave up and told him I'd call back. I'll bet they have to tell me who accessed my account information, but I have not yet looked it up on the internet. Somebody just dinged my credit score by 30 points [guess] by making the credit card company open a new account.

At least I have a topic to blog about! It's been a week with out a posting.

Ya know they could cancel and reissue me a new account every week if no one is watching this type of activity by the card companies.

SEO Techniques that work

2010-02-02T22:59:00.001-05:00

I must be doing something right, as last month had the highest numbers of both Unique Visitors and Visits [same person with more than one visit].

In addition to adding content and a few dozen new pages over the last few months, I have also been doing Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

As I've indicated in previous posts the SEO techniques primarily include adding 'alt' tags to pic files and 'title' tags to internal links. Many pages already had the html tags, but many pages did not have the enhancement, with some pages only having part of them. I've been making these enhancements over the last six months.

So my advice is to insure that every pic file has an 'alt' tag that describes what the picture is. In many cases a pic file also has a 'title' tag which describes the picture in greater detail. At the same time any page-to-page link also gets a 'title' tag, if it didn't already have one.

Now you could say that the increase in visits is due to content additions, or from adding new pages. However I would disagree, because although I have been adding a lot of new content, the per page content added is small. Or, much of the content added over the last six months is spread out over several hundred pages.

Secondly, the amount of new pages added over that time frame is also small, say around 61 pages in six months. Now you could say that was a great many additions to the site, but I'll try to indicate why it's not.

First off , any new page added last month [and December too] are still in the Google sand box and is irrelevant [Trimmer Resistor; random example]. Also any page added last month may not have even been completely spider-ed. So we'll forget about the 22 most recent page additions. November saw a lot of Component Package additions, pages holding gif files with little or no text ~ another 17 pages. October had a few 'How-To' additions which receive no hits to speak of ~ 8 pages. Same thing with September, just a few BJT Outline drawings which will receive zero visits ~ 4 pages. Now we're back to August, which is about the time frame that should start to matter, but again a few 'How-To' additions ~ 3 pages.

So I would discount 54 of the last 61 new pages as not adding anything to the site yet [really all of them]. I always assume 15 to 30 days before Google spiders a page. Than another 30 days before Google reads the page completely, still another 3 months after that before a page gets a Page Rank [if at all]. I'm not saying these pages aren't getting any page views just that the few dozen page views they are getting wouldn't show up as a change on the graph.

I contend that the increase in visits is due almost entirely from optimizing the pages for the search engines. Really, I've been adding pages to the site for years and I don't see any sustained increase in visits ~ but I do now. Search Engine Optimization has been the biggest change I've been making to the greatest number of pages over the last few months. The last few months are the highest for the site ever, not counting December [always a low month].

Now these 'alt' or 'title' tags also help site visitors, either by showing text if the gif doesn't come in or by providing detail if they hover over a link ~ it's win-win.

Now there is always one more point some would could make about the increase in page visits. That is the Google computer pushed this site up near the top of the search listing while another site moved to the second page. That argument could work for one month, but not for the last four months. As Google re-orders their listing every month. More importantly, we're talking about 1,600 individual pages, Google didn't push all of them to the first page!

Finally my page on Google Sites [Thermal Impedance ~ random page] is bringing in about 60 people/month, 73% of which are new to the site, word of mouth traffic? Googl Knol is bringing in yet another 60 visits per month at 57% new visitors [Component Derating ~ just a random page]. However neither of those referrals would seem to add up to the 10,000 additional visits which occurred last month, but it doesn't hurt either.

Right, we're trying to explain 20,000 new visitors, and the only thing I can say other then it is due to the SEO changes is that some how the few hundred visitors due to page additions or referrals adds into the thousands ~ I don't think so. Add the html TAGs.....

Why was my Page De-Listed

2010-02-01T17:54:00.001-05:00

I pulled up one of my To-Do lists, sort of; add these companies to these pages [last accessed 2006].
I don't make To-Do lists any more, a few years ago I just started putting the data in an email and saving it as a draft. But I'm not blogging about the amount of data I have sitting around waiting to be added.

I checked one of the companies listed to see if it had already been added to the web site, on-site Google search indicated it had not. So I navigated to the 'manufacturers listing' to add the new company. Well guess what, the listing was there [Component Manufacturers]. So I see that the page has no Page Rank, but I can also conclude that the page will not show in Google search results [which is worse]. Although the page does exist and provides site visitors with data about the companies residing on that page, off-site users will never find the information because it will not come up in a search.
As with all pages in the Manufacturers Listing, the page has been on the web for many years. I don't understand why I can't get them listed. I do have pages pointing to them and they do get updated every now and then. I even have those pages listed in the Engineering Site-Map, but because Google uses 'no-follow' on Google Sites the link does me no good.

Although it might defeat the purpose of the page, I guess I could find some kind of text to add to the pages.
Other wise I have no way to protect the page from the computer algorithm deciding to list it or not.

Page Optimization

2010-01-31T17:46:00.000-05:00

I'm always adding new content to the web site [Engineering Buses], either by inserting additional content to existing pages or just by adding new pages. So far this year 10 new pages have been added to the site, I don't track content enhancement. However I can tell how many pages have been updated, either from SEO practices or content additions, from the modified date on the PC I can tell how many pages have changed..
Jan; 327 page updates.
Dec; 328 page updates.
Nov; 389 page updates.
Oct; 296 page updates.
And so on, like I said I can't tell why a page was updated. However I could say that a page either received an embedded enhancement to help the search engines or had additional content added, and maybe an SEO change. Normally when I fix a page for optimization reasons it just means I added 'alt' or 'title' tags to links or gif files already present on the page.

I also add graphic or pic files all the time. Currently my PC indicates over 1,600 pic file [in a few different formats, gif, jpg..], however some may not be used but still reside on my PC. Maybe 1,500 different pic files and over 1,851 html files ~ both growing all the time.

So this month will have the highest number of visitors ever, not even counting today [numbers aren't in yet]. Here are the best 5 months [Number of Visits];
Jan 2010: 234,085
Oct 2009: 223,689
Nov 2009: 223,327
Mar 2009: 220,620
Jan 2008: 217,694
Graphic; Google Crawl Stats, last three months. At an average of 519 pages crawled a day, you would think that Google would find the 300 odd pages that are up-dated each month.

BluRay BD Player

2010-01-29T15:06:00.001-05:00

I did end up buying a BluRay disk player the other day. However I want to play with it for another day or so before I write a review or make any recommendations one way or the other.

First off the resolution of a Blu-Ray disk far exceeds a DVD, more than I would have figured possible. I did purchase one BD DVD which I'll review below, but I was not to happy with the price. I only purchased one because there was a limited amount on the shelf, for what ever reason.

Which leads me to my second point, why are Blu-ray disks over ten dollars more than a DVD. I think we all know that the cost of a BD or DVD should be about the same. So instead of being taken advantage of I think I'll continue purchasing DVDs unless a Blu-ray disk is required, as in a Sci-FI or other high-res type movie. I see no need for some comedy or second rate movie to be in Blu-ray. Same as I wouldn't care if a comedy was in 7.1 surround sound, in fact I may not even turn my receiver on for a comedy.

None of the units ship with an HDMI cable, so be sure to purchase one with the unit. I figured I had one at home, but of course was to find out I didn't. So I started watching with Component Video and the Audio from Composite Video, Opps. However I did end up going out the next day to purchase an HDMI cable and a longer Ethernet Cable [to connect to my router].

So I find I can down load movies off the internet right into my Blu-ray player, that seemed a bit cool. There's even a few free movies out on-line, although I wouldn't recommend them. I also started watching [as background noise while working on the PC] an advertiser supported movie on-line. But as it stopped several minutes into the movie, and the room went silent, to download the advertisement I shut it off. Can't they buffer up those commercials? I mean it only took a few seconds of down-load time, but it just seemed like they were wasting my time waiting for an ad to download that I didn't even want to see in the first place.

Anyway I purchased Pandorum in Blu-ray. I like SciFi, and to me this one seemed pretty good.
Yes it is a Zombie in Space move [trapped on a spaceship], but so what, I just kept turning up the volume to see what would happen next. As you would guess there's a lot of running and hiding from the "Zombies", other wise they eat you. Now they're not really Zombies, but it's the same difference. Oh and these guys run like the 'new' Zombies [Resident Evil, 28 Days Later], they don't stumble like zombies from the 60's or 70's .

To many of the screens were dark [poorly lit], and there could have been one less chase scene but I liked it [and it looked great in Blu-ray].

So this is a prelude to a technical review of a Blu-ray player. I haven't started reviewing movies!

URLs Indexed by Google

2010-01-28T19:02:00.000-05:00

This is the big question, right?
How do I get my pages indexed by Google?
I would say that the bigger question is how do I keep my pages index by Google.
Oh and the answer to either of these questions is of course '42'.

What I just noticed is that incoming links from other sites that are not indexed do not count as an incoming link. Maybe I already realized that fact, as I've seen many pages over the years fade in and out of the index. That's one of the many reason a page rank will go up or down, as pages fade in or out.

So using Google's Webmaster Tools to check the status of incoming links to pages, I found this; Most of the pages relating to the Dictionary of Capacitor Terms [topic page with the lowest page views] only had one external link pointing to them. Well that might be ok, but basically all pages should have at least one external incoming link, from my sitemap [interfacebus Site-Map]. The sitemap is located out on 'Google Sites' which is external to interfacebus.com. The difference here is that I know that the Capacitor Terms were only added to the site a few years ago. All new pages (page additions), in the last few years, get blogged about in the 'What's New Blog' [Engineering Pages]. So if I blogged about adding Capacitor Definitions [blog 11/17/07; Electronic Capacitor Dictionary], why is the external link from blogger [owned by Google] not being recognized? It certainty can't be because Google has not found it, it's been out on the web for two years.

Now that blog page, providing all the links, does have a page rank of zero [really no page rank available]. So can I also assume that the page is also not indexed in Google's listing?
Now I see another blogger page adding two new pages to the Capacitor Terms [blog 10/26/08; Dictionary of Capacitor Terms], that blog page also has no page rank and the two new Capacitor page links are also not recognized in Webmaster Tools.

I blog about new pages for two reasons; first to show visitors what new pages have been added and to set the new page up with an incoming external link [SEO stuff]. Standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] says to try and get external links pointing to your pages, well that's what I was trying to do. But if the pages I use go to a page rank of zero once they fall of the front of this blog than it's kind of pointless.

I could add a 'history' page on the site, pointing to these blog pages. That would give the blog listings a page rank. Seems like a lot of effort, and kind of hard to keep track of [with all the different topics on the site]. Of course just by blogging about the other blog pages help [if that makes any sense].

I'll have to think about what SEO advice to give. However what I can say is that just because you blog about a page it really doesn't mean that the benefit will last more than a few months. So you have to find a way to keep a page ranking for pages that are used as 'external links'. One way would be to cross link, as I just did with this posting [pointing to the older blog posts]. Of course another way would be to re-post the pages, which I'll do now to make a point. However I don't recommend listing you page links over and over again in a blog ~ why would any one read the blog.......
Capacitor Dictionary pages, listed by the first term on each page.
Air Dielectric definition. [Page 1, main topic]
Capacitor Breakdown definition. [Page 2]
DC Leakage definition. [Page 3]
Electrode definition. [Page 4]
Farad definition. [Page 5]
Ganged Tuning definition. [Page 6]
Impedance. [Page 7]
Capacitor Manufacturers. [Page 8]
Paper Capacitor definitions. [Page 9]
Quality Factor definition. [Page 10]
Self Inductance definition. [Page 11]
Tantalum Electrolytic Capacitor definition. [Page 12]
Values, Capacitor definition. [Page 13]
..... This may appear to be a long post, but it's an important SEO topic that needs to addressed.
You'll note that I link to the Capacitor pages with a key word, and not just page 8 [for example] that means nothing to Google. Of course I also updated any of these pages as required.
Graphic; Leaded Chip Capacitor, Through-hole Capacitor.

Search Trends vs Page Views

2010-01-27T10:37:00.001-05:00

As we all know the original SCSI interface is in decline and has been for a number of years now. The 'old' parallel bus is up against Fiber Channel [FC], Serial SCSI [SAS] and Serial ATA [SATA] to name a few of the possible Hard Drive interfaces.

In fact I found a chart of Worldwide HDD Shipments; All Form Factors by Interface, 2008-2012 [produced in 2009], units shipments vs year. The chart indicates that SCSI may have had a few percentage of the total units shipped in 2008, but is all but gone in 2009 and beyond. Seems right to me, of course there still must be a large amount of units still deployed even now, regardless of SCSI being obsolete. Their projection for 2010 indicates that 90+ drive units shipped would contain either a SAS or SATA interface.

But almost no SCSI drive was ever used as a personal 'home use' HDD interface, as the SCSI interface was always more expensive than an IDE drive interface. So most people would have never even had a chance to worry if they had an out-dated SCSI interface in their PC.

So as SCSI searches [on Google] dropped 90% over the last 4 years, SCSI page views on interfacebus have been flat. So why is that? The trend line above shows a tremendous drop in searches over the last four years, but visitors to this site remain constant. That tells me that over the previous last few years I've missed out on a large amount of incoming traffic. Were the pages on this site always relegated to some small portion of the key words, I guess there's no way to tell. Normally I don't like to finds pages that are in decline, but in this case I wish I did. Only because now I know that for a vast amount of internet searches related to the SCSI bus this site was never used. Any way; here are the rest of the pages that make up the SCSI section;
SCSI I interface description.
SCSI II interface description.
SCSI III interface description.
SCSI VI interface description.
SCSI V interface description.
SCSI single ended A cable, and SCSI differential ended A cable.
SCSI single ended Q cable, and SCSI differential ended Q cable.
SCSI B connector, and SCSI P connector.
SCSI HDI-30 connector.

SEO advice; I don't have any optimization advice this time. Although pageviews to this SCSI related section have been constant, they have been consistently low.

Side note; I tried looking up 'Hard drive market forecast', HDD Sales trends, market volume and so on but I could only retrieve a table of contents to reports that had to be purchased. So finding the data is a bit hard and took a number of searches to uncover.
Graph: From Google Trends, using the search term SCSI [2004 to Jan 2010].

How to increase page content and grow visitors

2010-01-26T10:23:00.001-05:00

Now we are looking at a different section of the site to determine how long to takes to gain new page views. A Dictionary of Resistor Terms section was added on April 11 2008 [blog posting; Resistor Definitions] consisting of ten pages. Some of the pages were larger or had more content then others, but 10 pages with ten different web addresses were added. The attached graphic shows the weekly pageviews for that section over time.

Now over time more and more content was slowly added as a new definition was added or a resistor definition was expanded. Also related content was added, as in 'Trimmer Packages', but was included in a different section of the site which is not represented as being part of the Resistor Dictionary. As a few of the pages grow to large they were subdivided into two pages growing the size in pages of the dictionary. For example back in June of 2009 [blog; Terms used with Resistors], the page "F-M' was separated into two pages increasing the size of the dictionary from 10 to 14 pages.

Now to the point; look how long it takes even to get a small amount of page views. It took 8 months before the page views consistently lifted off the zero floor. Another 6 months after that before the pageviews doubled. So, over a year before the section started to get a decent amount of page views. Still 6 months after that and the pageviews are just stable, or maybe increasing just a tad.

As always my SEO advice is start a page topic as soon as possible. Now if the page has little or no content don't blog about it. Just add it to your site-map or let the search engine find it over the upcoming month.

The bad side of this increase [which is only a few dozen pageviews] is that over the same time frame, other pages are declining in page views. For example the Unified Display Interface has been declining ever sense the page was added three years ago. Now that standard was started but never supported so it's not the fault of the web page. The issue leaves the entire web site with near flat pageviews, as some pages are increasing while other have to see a decrease in pageviews.

Test Equipment Manufacturers

2010-01-25T10:25:00.001-05:00

Just at random I figured I would check how the small section of Test Equipment Manufacturers was doing. The page count, or the number of pages in the section has been stable for a while. The last addition was Thermal Test Chambers added back in Feb 2008. Before that the Frequency Counter page was added in Nov. 2007. All the other pages predate those additions and never showed up in the other blog...

So which page is doing the worst so far this year; LXI Test Equipment. Now I just saw an article, from last year, about how LXI was growing but I can't tell from the hits I'm getting. Also because I always update a page I blog about, a new manufacturer was added, which seem to be pushing LXI-VXI. It was my impression that LXI was competing with the HPIB interface. The difference being small, but HPIB gear is normally stand-alone equipment and VXI cards embedded in a chassis.
After that the page covering Thermal Image Manufacturers did the worst.
The rest of the pages in the section are listed below.
Spectrum Analyzer Manufacturers.
RF Power Meter Manufacturers.
OTDR Manufacturers.
Cable Tester Manufacturers.
Protocol Analyzer Manufacturers.
Used Test Gear.

While getting these links off the site I did notice that the page on Cable Testers has no page rank, not sure what is wrong here. The Cable Test page received more hits than five other pages in the section [which is not saying much] over the last 30 days. I see in Webmaster tools that no other external page links to it, that would effect the page rank.
Looking at last years data, these three pages did not even receive 1 visit per day [less then 365 page hits]:
LXI Test Gear, Thermal Chambers, and Frequency Counters......

Internet Browser Wars

2010-01-21T20:10:00.000-05:00

Seems with the issue of the new flaw found in Internet Explorer I went out and checked which browser was being used most to access the web site. Well IE still gets used the most, but it looks like it's down another 3%, with Google Chrome inching up another few percentage points.
But that's nothing like I'm reading on the web about the large increase in downloads of Firefox. However most of my visitors come from the US and I think most of the recent Firefox downloads were in Germany and France [which had recommended dumping MS IE].
I also see that version 3.6 of Firefox is ready for download, so I'll do that now. I'm using 3.5.7 and sometimes it would hang for maybe 45 seconds? ~ That went well....

I did check how a few pages were doing, both speaker related. Neither page is doing well.
Mechanical Speakers. Companies that produce speakers, with out a case or speaker box.
Computer Speakers. Companies that make computer speakers or AV Speakers.
Both of these pages have been on the internet for years now.

Web Statistics Increasing

2010-01-20T08:50:00.000-05:00

I really don't want to keep blogging about the same topic over and over again, but. The web site just received more than 10,000 visits in a single day. Yesterday the interface bus web site received 10,126 visits. That's up from maybe 9,500 visits last week and 8,500 visits last month.
That's the first time the site ever received over 10,000 visits in a single day. So this year should see two to 400,000 more visits than last year, and last year was the highest ever......

As normal, here are a few pages that are not recieving many pageviews and were never listed in the 'What's new blog'. All related to equipment cases.
This would be one of the few times I list a page with up-dating it. Each of these links looked ok, so no updates for now. The topics should be the main reason for low page views, but I do expect many more page views for the Transit case page. How many people would look up Captive screws?
Manufacturers of Transit Cases. Equipment cases used for transport.
Manufacturers of ATCA Chassis. Telcom equipment chassis.
Chassis Card Guide Manufacturers. PWB Card Guides.
Captive Screw Manufacturers. Captive screws for equipment.
Equipment Chassis Specifications. Spec document numbers and titles.

Oh the highest number of page views in Jan 2009 was 8,415 pageviews. Or an increase of 1,700 page views this year over last.

Graphic; Rack mount power inverter.

Blu-ray disk player recomendation

2010-01-19T20:35:00.000-05:00

I think it's finally time to purchase a Blu-ray disk player. Not really sure why I've been waiting so long. Of course when the players first came out they were over priced, but that was a while ago.

Some time later I heard that Blu-ray players took forever to boot the movie up, which stopped me from making any purchased. Now I see that they want to increase Blu-ray disk storage space from 25GB to 33.4GB. However it appears that any Blu-ray player would require a firmware upgrade. I also see that by next year there will be 3D Blu-ray players, which also tells me that I would also need a 3D TV [what ever that is] and 3D movies. The 3D Bluray specification was released in December 2009.

I assume I want a Bluray player that plays a number of formats
~ BD Live; Netflix-ready; Pandora-ready; Blockbuster-ready; plays BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R, CD-RW discs

Interfaces Required
HDMI,
DVI,
USB,
Component Video,
Ethernet, for the Internet.
Not that I would ever use one but;
Internet Connect-able.

Interfaces not required
S-Video, the interface is outdated.
Firewire, not realy used by any one.

Now it my seem a bit odd but I would also like to stay with Sony. A lot of my gear is already Sony, so it kind of makes it easy getting the remote to work. Plus my remote is a Sony Remote Commander [RM-AV3000]. Now the remote is a little dated now, but I see no reason to get a new remote, as I already have a dozen other remotes that of course I don't use.

Pageview Counter Data

2010-01-17T19:34:00.001-05:00

I happened to be updating the Antenna Tracking System pages.
So I opened up the Pageviews from Google Analytics filtered by 'antenna-tracking'. The first thing I noticed was that those few related pages don't receive many pageviews, maybe 10/day at best. The first recorded page-view received was on September 7 2007. Now that date occurs before I started the Engineering Page Additions blog, so I checked to see if any of the pages were ever mentioned. A few of the pages were listed in regards to a new page addition on Waveguides [post], back in 01/01/09.

So the point is why are these several pages not getting any pageviews and why are the pageviews flat [and low] over the last few years. Just by adding the links below I see one problem, as a few of the pages only have one manufacturer.
Antenna Tracking Systems; Main section page.
.... Antenna Towers;
.... RF Amplifiers; High Power Amps.
.... Antenna Controllers; Positioning Gear.
.... Light Antenna Pedestals;
.... Medium Antenna Pedestals;
.... Heavy Duty Antenna Pedestals;
...... Waveguides; .
The first thing I did was update a few of the pages, by adding new manufacturers. However I could not up-date all the pages because I could not find many companies making antenna pedestals. Companies want to produce systems, not just pedestals.

The second thing was to add the page addresses in this blog posting. I'm not saying that so many people read this blog that the page views will increase. But that Google will see an external link and may give the page more importance.

Oh, and by up-dating the page I showed Google that the pages are 'fresh'. You may have noticed when doing a search that Google postings show the date [listed on the page] that it was last updated. That fact tells me that Google is looking at this date, and may be taking note of the date.

So I added the pages in 2007, blogged about some of them in 2009, and now re-listed them in 2010 and corrected a number of short comings. I even added two more page to page links on the site.

Graphic; a Servo control unit.

Anchor Text

2010-01-15T14:32:00.002-05:00

I'm out looking over Google's Webmaster Tools for the web site [Interface Buses]. I found a few issues with Short meta descriptions or Duplicate meta descriptions. Normally these HTML issues are caused because while generating a new page I copy a related current page. So I fixed most of them, the ones left are redundant pages.

The tools also give me a list of all the pages on my site and who links to them, or how many different pages link to them. I'll list a few pages here that only have a few incoming page links.

It was the Anchor text I really wanted to blog about. The Anchor Text is the HTML link on a page that points to another page. You always want to select a descriptive word or phrase. But I'm looking at this Anchor list and I see three people using the phrase 'here', another three pages using the term 'link', 'this', '1' and so on.

Now I don't control how someone links to one of my pages, but I can control how I link to internal pages. I see a few links here I may have used by mistake, like 'read more' or 'definition'.
SEO hint, when you find these trade them out for a better phrase.
Definition of Cable Armor.
Read more on Twisted Pair Cables.
What is a Gender Changer.

This is blog posting number 500

Comparing Visitors

2010-01-11T09:34:00.000-05:00

Just a short posting showing visitors for the first week in January for this year and last year. The site has not made it back to 9,500 visits/day yet but I would think that will happen this week. Visits are up several hundred on the week ends and about 1000 on the week days. There are still more Electrical Interfaces going obsolete than being generated [as in yesterdays posting]. So any increase in page visits are good. Over 120 pages have already been up-dated so far this year, including these obsolete interfaces;
STD32 Interface.
SpringBoard Expansion.
STEBus.

Graphic; Statistics from AWSTATS.

The Demise of CableCard

2010-01-08T12:22:00.003-05:00

Back in December the FCC came out with a media release indicating that CableCard was having only limited success. Other web sites change the phrase 'limited success' to 'total failure' of the CableCard approach pushed by the FCC. In fact back in September of last year the Consumer Electronics Association [CEA] went to the FCC complaining that it didn't appear that CableCard was doing anything for competition. So it seems that CableCard will have a very short life, what two years. Really zero years, I don't have any gear that uses a CableCard and have never even seen one.

One word about why I'm blogging about CableCard, and then I'll move on to re-posting two previous blog entries on the issue [with more back-ground information].

Checking last years analytics data I found that three of the four pages covering CableCard have received less than a dozen page views each for the year. I would expect a few more page views than that for a released standard, so I took notice and wondered why that was.
Here are the three CableCard pages and their visits [they differ only in pin-outs]:
S-Mode CableCard. 14 visits.
M-Mode CableCard. 13 visits.
CEA-679-Mode CableCard. 11 visits.

Blog Posting [10/5/06 CableCard]:
CableCARD from what I have found so far is a 16-bit PC Card in a PCMCIA format. CableCARD was designed to replace the cable box from the cable company; any company could produce a CableCARD from the standard so you were not locked into renting from the cable company. This was the FCC.

CableCARD appears as a PCMCIA slot on the back of HDTV sets.

Any how version 1.0 came out last year [2005] from I understand and has a few draw backs. Information only flows one-way with CableCARD. So with CableCARD you are not able to use Pay-per-view because the card only receives signals from the cable company it does not send information out to them. Seems like a lot of people are already waiting for CableCARD 2.0 to come out to address the short comings of version 1.0.

So CableCARD from a hardware view is just another implementation of the PCMCIA card. Why they used the out-dated PC Card interface escapes me.

Blog Posting [8/27/07 CableCard]:

I was out looking at Digital TV's on-line, up-dating the web sites listing for CableCard. This is a PCMCIA slot and PCMCIA card, a tuner card that can be inserted into a slot in the TV to replace a cable set-top box. Some TV descriptions indicate the term CableCard, while others indicate Digital Cable Ready [see below]. I was only able to find a few HDTV units from Hitachi which came with a CableCard slot. I see a few from Sony too. The CableCard allows the user to plug cable directly into a TV set without the need for a set-top box [STB]. CableCard slots may also be found on Digital Video Recorders [DVR]

Version 1 of CableCard was 'one-way' only so with out the cable decoder box things like 'pay-per-view' was unavailable. Version 2 released in June of this year should be fixing this problem [I have not yet reviewed it]. As of July 07 according to an FCC ruling; cable companies now have to supply set-top boxes that come with a removable CableCard. The ruling may bring CableCard back from the dead.

As far as PCs with a CableCard slot ~ forget it [for now]. CableCard interfaces are only available on Windows Vista machines and only with new OEM PC purchases. So you can't go to a store and purchase an up-grade to add CableCard, it has to be bundled with a new PC. Here's a quote;

"AMD's Digital Cable Tuner will only be available from PC manufacturers, and then only with a new Vista PC. There are no plans for support on Windows XP, nor are there any plans to sell the Digital Cable Tuner as a standalone product. "CableLabs has to know about every single system manufactured," ..... "They require full encryption and content protection, which means it's bound to Windows Media Center." HP has one: Digital Tuner-equipped m8010y.

Digital Cable Ready [DCR], this attribute describes a TV that incorporates a CableCARD slot to facilitate the reception of one-way digital cable content (which may include analog, digital, high-definition and/or premium programming) without the need for a set-top box. A CableCARD is typically provided for a nominal monthly fee by the cable provider. Sets may also use the term Digital Cable Turner.

So the CableCard standard was released in 2005, with only a few products available by 2007, crushed in 2009 and I assume no longer supported in any new product by 2010 [never being used by anybody]. However it is still mandated by the FCC, so they would have to change their rules.....

Webalizer Stats

2010-01-07T18:44:00.002-05:00

It may be over a year now, but I finally pulled up the report by Webalizer today. Webalizer is a server side stats counter that just gathers data about how many times a web page is viewed. It's ok for a counter but I like AWSTATS better. AWSTATS is also a server side counter, but I have both set up and running.

Some of the visit data shown in these posts is from AWSTATS, but most of the graphics are from Google Analytics [which does not reside on the server]. Oh non of the three counters agree, they all differ by a few percentage.

What I wanted to do is post the visits per hour for the web page [from Webalizer]. The site is an 'engineering portal' type site for electrical engineers.
The odd thing I see in the data is that most of the visits occur around 8am, while I would think that most of the visits should occur later in the day when the entire country is awake. Most of the page visits to the website are from the US, so why wouldn't most of the traffic occur after 1pm?
.

Google Sites [Nofollow]

2010-01-06T11:57:00.004-05:00

Although I do like Google Sites I did want to mention one particular issue with using the free service, which some people may find important. But first a few good things about Google Sites.

First off Google Sites is free to use, there are no fees or costs involved with the service.
Second, it's easy to generate web pages ~ like this one [ http://sites.google.com/site/interfacebus/Home ].
I think they call them web pages, unlike a web site. I assume because you can only integrate the web pages together in a particular way. Of course you can upload and integrate pic files and text.
Finally you can use your Adsense code, or run Google Ads.

So what is the problem with Google Sites; well Google does not follow the links on the site. Every link you add to your web pages gets a HTML tag called no-follow [ rel=nofollow ]. The nofollow tag tells every search engine not to follow your link and in Google's case not to give the page it points to any Page Rank.

You can use the site to generate and run a web page, but you can not use the site to promote another web site [with a search engine]. So you can start a web page there and point your visitors to another web site, but you can't point any search engine to a different site because the links don't work.

Last year I would have advised someone just starting out to begin with Google Sites, just to get off the ground and get a Page Rank. Now because you can't pass a Page Rank, I would advice people to bit the bullet and buy a web address and rent server time. It's just pointless to spend time working a web page if it doesn't help with Page Rank for any other web page generated sometime later. The best example; you want web presence now and six months later you come up with a business name. When you do buy that web address [your-site.com] no one points to it and it has a zero page rank [so you start from scratch again].

Now when Google Knol started they also used the nofollow tag for the first three months. However because of so many complaints they dropped it several months in. So now links from any Google Knol you write do work with search engines. Example Knol I started on Component Derating.

Graphic; Panel Mount LED, Red color.

Increasing Page Visits

2010-01-05T10:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday had 8,513 visits or about what October had for page visits. So they are starting to make a come back over the last few weeks. November saw around 9,000/day while December had around 9,500/day [before the holidays]. I'm hoping to get back to normal by next week.

This December was the highest Dec. ever, as high-lighted by the red lines on the chart. Even better, December was higher than many other months last year which is not the norm.

I'm still looking at sections of the site that did not receive a minimum of 365 page views. I'm not sure when these following pages were added, maybe this year. Note that I'm taking the first definition on each page.

SEO Hint; Sometimes you want to link to a page using the same term [resistor Definitions] while other times you may want to link to a page with a relevant but less common term [used here].
Network Resistor Definition. 155 page views
Ohm Definition. 177 page views
Phenolic Molded Resistor. 274 page views
Quick Connect Resistor. 298 page views
Damping Resistor. 334 page views
Semiconductor Resistor. 337 page views
If you continue to use the same term or phrase to link to a page, Google sees the phase as important to that page. However; if you pick different terms than Google sees each of those terms as relevant [but less important] to the page. Ever see a page returned from a Google search that indicates [in the Google frame], the term was only found in links pointing to this page.... I'm still using terms found on the pages.

Graph; Data per month from AWSTATS 1/01/06 to 12/31/09.

2009 Web Stats

2010-01-01T10:04:00.000-05:00

As reported by Google Analytics interfacebus received 2,245,193 visits with 4,082,072 page views.

Greatest amount of visitors outside the US; India: 154,048 visits.

Source with the largest amount of visitors; Wikipedia: 25,268 visits.

Bandwidth used on the server; 11.11 G Bytes.

Worst web pages [low visits]:
2N4931 Temp derating.
2N6764 Temp Derating.
2N6770 Temp Derating.

Top three browsers used;
Internet Explorer 55.25%
Firefox 34.39%
Chrome 3.81%
That the highest I've seen Firefox at, or the lowest that MS Explorer has been.

Graphic; Web visits over the last five years.

End of Year up-date

2009-12-31T10:39:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-30T01:29:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-29T07:50:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-26T10:46:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-23T19:04:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-22T17:51:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-19T21:26:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-17T19:01:00.002-05:00

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.