Web Server, http Status codes

This is a chart for http status codes returned from the server hosting interfacebus.com for the month of July. There are a dozen or so pages that have been orphaned and moved to a new page address; however, those old addresses still get traffic [code 301]. The 'Document Not Found' or 404 code normally comes from people linking in or typing in the wrong page address. I try to catch some of that missed traffic by generating a page with the incorrect address ~ if it's getting traffic. Many mis-spelling can't be corrected, as they are missing the ".html" at the end of the address. There are 115 pages that target bad page addresses....

The server issues, codes 404 and 500, are just that ~ problems with the web server. Not sure what code 405 is?

Visits by Country

Over looking at the Google Analytic data for interfacebus.com. I find that so far this year 43.68% of the visitors are from the US [577,152]. The next highest is the United Kingdom with 6.46% [85,299]. Followed by India [67,068], Canada [65,164], Germany [39,337] and so on.
Total visits so far 1,321,240 [from 222 countries]. With 2,746,725 page views.

The interesting thing about the map, there are five countries that have not used the web page this year ~ guess they don't have an internet [countries in white]. They are Chad, Central African Republic, Western Sahara, Turkmenistan, and North Korea.

Digital TV

I'm reminded that at midnight on February 17, 2009, federal law requires that all full-power television broadcast stations stop broadcasting in analog format and broadcast only in digital format.

As of March 1, 2007, all television receivers shipped in interstate commerce or imported into the United States must contain a digital tuner.

A special antenna generally is not needed to receive digital signals. You may have antenna issues, however, if your current antenna does not receive UHF signals (channels 14 and above) well, because most DTV stations are on UHF channels.

In other words if you don't have cable or satellite or a TV with a Digital Tuner, you receive snow.

• Standard Definition TV (SDTV) - SDTV is the basic level of quality display and resolution for both analog and digital. Transmission of SDTV may be in either the traditional (4:3) or widescreen (16:9) format.
  
  

• Enhanced Definition TV (EDTV) - EDTV is a step up from Analog Television. EDTV comes in 480p widescreen (16:9) or traditional (4:3) format and provides better picture quality than SDTV, but not as high as HDTV.
  
  

• High Definition TV (HDTV) - HDTV in widescreen format (16:9) provides the highest resolution and picture quality of all digital broadcast formats. Combined with digitally enhanced sound technology, HDTV sets new standards for sound and picture quality in television. (Note: HDTV and digital TV are not the same thing -- HDTV is one format of digital TV.)

Page Content

Content is added to the web site all the time. In some cases a new page and topic is added, other times new content is added to an existing page. In either case I do not expect the search engines to find the new material for a month, although the site gets crawled all the time to the tune of 300 pages a day.

New page address will not receive a page rank for about 3 months after the page is posted, so I also assume any new page will not do well for that length of time. However, any new content will benefit a visitor if they stumble upon the information.

Over the last few months the Google Search bar has been added to more and more pages. Again it will only display pages in a search that have been spidered. The amount of income generated from using the search bar is shown in the chart to the left. Income has increased as the bar was added to more pages. Many pages still do not display the search bar.

Unique Visits for 07

An updated chart showing unique visitors to interfacebus.com from 2001 to June 2007. Total visitors, or returning visits range between 1.5x and 2.5x that number. Total page views so far this year are 2,131,154. Page views for 2006 were 3,688,317. Traffic from robots account for another 100,000 hits a-month [ 800MB of bandwidth] which are not shown. Normal traffic accounts for over 10GB of bandwidth a month. March 2007 saw 13.28GB of bandwidth usage. Total pages in the site are 1,220 as indicated in the Google cache. In coming web links; 2483 different url's, however most link to a page other than the home page.

Adsense Earnings

The web site interfacebus.com has now reached $100,000 in earnings from the Google Adsense program. In fact its $88 from reaching that point, however I will not have an opportunity to post when it does hit the mark around 10 am on Friday.

The picture to the left shows the monthly income from the program on a per month basis. July 07 is not shown because the month is on-going. Also, although income has been declining this year that is partly due to a reduction in the amount of hits to the site. For example June was down 20,000 hits [45,000 page views] from May. Previous blog posting show hits and or page views to the web site. It's common for the site to rise or fall 20,000 hits around a center of 120,000 hits.

The cost of running the web site is about $20/month for the server space and $6/year for the domain name ~ or less than $330 a year. The site returns its cost in a few days, with all other income as profit. Profit last year was $69,000, estimated profit this year $50,000.

Proceeds have declined, but much of the last few months have been spent updating content instead of optimizing ad placement ~ it's a time trade-off.

Up-keep about 2 hours a day to add new data, but the site runs its self, facts don't change. External links are checked once a month.

Why do I post this; why not:
The value of the web site could be based on any number of calculations; a common value is 4x the last 12 months ~ $250,000. The site e-mail address is located on the Home page. An e-mail with a figure exceeding that amount may receive a reply, any other amount will be ignored.

Can I post this information:
Google Terms and Conditions;
7. ......"However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.".... These numbers are accurate, based on the checks received.

Year 2006 1,550,092 unique visits, with 3,688,317 page impressions.

IDE Hard Drive

I saw an article yesterday indicating that Seagate would be dropping support for the IDE interface on its Harddrives this year. The IDE or ATA interface was in common usage until Serial ATA [SATA] came out in 2004. Once SATA was released the original ATA bus started to be called Parallel ATA [PATA] because it used a parallel bus while SATA was a serial interface.
Motherboards have been shipping with headers for either interface from 2004 on to support legacy drives. However as more companies continue to stop supporting the older [slower] PATA bus these interfaces may be dropped to save money.

SATA is an interface used between a Mother Board and an internal drive bay. A variant of SATA called eSATA may be used from the Motherboard to a Hard Disk Drive [HDD] external to the PC Case.

New Site Map

I posted a new site map out to Google pages; interfacebus_sitemap. I orphaned the older page, instead of up-dating it because of the file size. Normally while coping the code either the browser or the up-load crashes. So the html file was up-loaded.

The site map was generated from running Xenu, which is the program used to check links on the site. It lists all pages on the site and all pages that are linked from each page ~ so there is a lot of duplication. Many of the redundant pages have been removed. Over the next week the page will continue to be reduced. The current file size is 496k bytes

This sitemap differs from the XML site map used by the search engines.

Page Impressions by Section

Here is a break down of web site page impressions by section. I use Google Channels to divide the site into its major sections. Most of the channels are self defining. What isn't clear are how many pages make up any one group of pages. The number of pages are an estimate, but the page impressions are what was recorded.
A previous blog posting defines many of the major sections. This also sort of tracks what each section earns, except the Homepage which does not really earn that much, although it gets a great many hits. With the Home page, most people just click on one of the major page links to move to their topic.
These numbers cover Jan1 to July 20 2007.

Buses: 300 pages; 1,145,015 page impressions (Bus descriptions)
Hardware: 300 pages; 734,509 page impressions (Hardware manufacturers)
Website: 100 pages; 362,200 page impressions (Engineering Design)
Homepage: 2 pages; 107,013 page impressions (index.html)
Dictionary: 100 pages; 52,886 page impressions
Orphan: 20 pages; 49,717 page impressions (pages no longer link in)
Software: 12 pages; 16,728 page impressions
Manufacturers: 50 pages; 14,053 page impressions (Alphabetic company list)
Translated: 12 pages; 12,716 page impressions (non-English)
How to Chassis: 20 pages; 7,249 page impressions (Chassis design)
Blog: 250 pages; 5,431 page impressions (this blog)
Memory Obsolete: 6 pages; 4,846 page impressions
Google Page Creater: 20 pages; 3,646 page impressions
Search: 1 page; 2,862 page impressions
How to Adsense: 25 pages; 1,690 page impressions
Bad Address: 20 pages; 166 page impressions (mis-spelled page addresses)
Total page impressions: 2,521,035 page impressions

Site Organization

interfacebus.com is set up like a tree. The main site pages are displayed at the bottom of this page and are some what self explanatory. The main section is divided into a number of sub-sections. Clicking the main icon will display the next section in greater detail. The largest sections are; 1. Components, 2. Buses, 3. Reference. The Reference section contains many pages because of the large Dictionary, Glossaries, and Acronyms sections. There are a great many interface buses for both consumer and industrial computers. The Buses section contains both obsolete and cutting edge bus descriptions. The same for Component manufacturers, however this section is mostly links to OEM companies. The Equipment section is also mostly links to OEM manufacturers.
Distributors: A listing of companies that sell parts and equipment, but are not manufacturers
Components: A list of companies that manufacture piece parts, IC's, Connectors, LED's .....
Equipment: A list of companies that manufacture assemblies; Chassis, Computers, Backplanes ..
Software: A list of companies that produce either consumer or industrial software packages
Standards: List of Standards Organizations, On-line Publications, and Book stores
Buses: Descriptions of all types of computer interface buses w/ interface IC's & Connector manufacturers
Design: Back-ground info on component size, Temperature ratings, Derating and so on
Reference: Every thing else; AWG size, Jobs, PWB info, VHDL, Dictionaries, Acronyms

New sub-sections are added all the time, as are new links. Dead links are removed as their found. Use the search link located on most pages to find a particular page. Google is showing 1,220 pages in its listing.

Blog Hits

Why does interfacebus.com do so well, but not the Blog? This blog only receives about 1000 hits a month. I'm ok with that because I use it to promote the web site, but unsure why the hits do not increase. Maybe just the topics? This is a graph of the last year and a half, with the 'Y' axis showing the number of hits. The high points are when the blog is promoted or when a topic appears to be interesting.

The blog does make an income, but it isn't much ~ with only 20 to 50 page impressions a day

Slow week

Normally US holidays produce a slow down in hits to the site. This week is no exception, with only 50% of incoming hits originating from the US.
America = 15,753
Europe = 8,954
Asia = 6,869
Oceania = 4,751
Africa = 2,184
It's expected, but discomforting. Instead of 8,000 hits a day I only saw 6,000 hits a day this week. However that's still better than a normal weekend. Earnings were down as well, with only 56,000 page impressions.

Google Adsense Earnings

So I was out looking at Google's Terms and Conditions, and I see this;

7. ......"However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program."....

Any way interfacebus.com is about to hit the $100,000 mark in earnings from running the Google Adsense program. I've been using the program for about a year and a half, and the amount the site generates is different every month. I should hit $100,000 by the middle of next month or the end of this month depending on how things go.

Keeping the site on-line, getting a decent amount of hits [FAQ] and so on all come into play.

I also started to run the LinkShare affiliate program for the last 2 months, but have not seen any income yet. However, those banners are only on a few dozen pages ~ with about 6000 page impressions so far. Before using Adsense the site made money by running banners from a number of different engineering companies.

Any how a few months ago I started a small section of pages to describe how to start a site and make money running ads ~  Just some hints I've learned while running this site ~ may give a jump start to a new site, or help optimise an on-going web site.

Hits to www.interfacebus.com double about every year to year and 1/2. I expect 1,600,000 unique hits this year with 3,700,000 page views [impressions]

Hard Drive Interfaces

I found an interesting graph today showing the up-coming status of different interfaces for either the 2.5" and 3.5" Hard Drive formats. The 3.5 inch Hard Disk Drive format is the preferred server format, while the 2.5 inch size is the preferred PC format.

In the 3.5 inch format:
Fiber Channel [FC] is anticipated to double, or increase from 5 million units to 10 million from this year out to 2010.
SCSI is predicted to drop from 20 million units this year to 15 million units by 2010.
SAS [Serial SCSI] is predicted to drop from 20 million units to 12 million units by 2010.
SATA is anticipated to increase shipments from 35 million units now to 60 million units by 2010.

In the 2.5 inch format:
FC jumps from 35 million units now to 65 million units
SATA jumps from 35 million units now to 65 million units
SAS jumps from 30 million units now to 55 million units

So SCSI, seems to be losing the server market, in either the parallel or serial format, while Serial SCSI [SAS] is increasing in the PC market [reduced cost].
Fiber Channel usage is increasing in both formats.
Serial ATA [SATA] is also increasing in both formats, which makes sense.

What does not make sense is that SAS seems to be declining, SAS uses the same interface as SATA so why the decline? I have to assume that the legacy programs still require the out-dated SCSI interface.

Alexa Ranking

Just posting a chart showing the ranking given by Alexa to interfacebus.com
The ranking is based on who visits the site while using an Alexa Tool bar on their computer.

I really don't know how many engineers are shoppers and really use the tool bar, so the data may be biased against an engineering web site. However, some people will asked~ how are you ranked on Alexa.

File Back-up

I backed-up my web data files last night to a flash drive. I cycle through different flash drives every other week. This last back-up went on a 512MB Memorex Traveldrive flash drive. Had to delete a few older versions to get it to fit, but I have a few other USB flash drives around with different versions on them.

Flash Memory Stick Formats

Web Site off-line

interfacebus.com has been off-line most of the day, and so far half the night. When it was on-line, up-loads were very slow. The last time I put in a trouble ticket was Apr 16 for the same reason. So the site misses a day just about every month. My host is at http://www.infinology.com/

It's not so much about the money the site is not making today, or the new visitors that can't find the site. I've blocked off so time to work on it, but I can't because I can't view the on-line pages. On-line viewing insures the pages that are up-loaded are the ones that should be ~ checking.

Link Checking

I ran Xenu on interfacebus.com today. Xenu is a spider that goes out and checks all the links on a page or web site. I run Xenu about once a month against the web site. It's a free program to down load. The main stats returned are:
ok 5377 URLs 98.97%
user skip 1 URLs 0.02%
no info to return 1 URLs 0.02%
no connection 18 URLs 0.33%
forbidden request 8 URLs 0.15%
temporarily overloaded 1 URLs 0.02%
no such host 10 URLs 0.18%
timeout 9 URLs 0.17%
not found 5 URLs 0.09%
the resource is no longer available 1 URLs 0.02%
auth required 1 URLs 0.02%
server error 1 URLs 0.02%
Total 5433 URLs 100.00%

I checked all the ones returned as Time-out, No-connect and so on and came up with 5 dead links. There were 4 other dead pages, but Google cache showed them good just a few days earlier. So 5 dead links out of 5433 total links ~ not so bad. However those 5 bad links were listed on 20 different internal pages, so it toke a few hours to run the program and fix the errors.

Xenu checks local page-to-page links as well, so it's a great program for any webmaster.

Languages

Here is yet another pic which shows what languages are used when www.interfacebus.com is accessed. The chart shows the first 10 languages, but there are another 157 in total. The remaining 147 countries would be part of the 8.24% of the chart. 75% of incoming hits are from the US, while another 2.81% are from other English speaking countries.
The hits are from Jan 1 to May 24 2007

Web Site Entry Page

I was looking at one of the statistics for Entry pages to interfacebus and noticed something strange. A number of pages that show obsolete interfaces still rank high for numbers of people hitting those pages as they enter the web site. The data is for May:
IDE Bus = 3217 [5th highest], replaced by SATA
AGP = 1064 [20th], replaced by PCIe
PC Parallel Port = 897 [30th], replaced by USB
Floppy Drive = 721, replaced by Flash drives

RS232 is another, which has been removed from PCs altogether.

This is just a few, there are 1150 entry pages in the list

Web Broswer

Staying with the last post, here is a listing of web browsers that are hitting interfacebus.com, from Jan 1 to May 10 2007. Most people use some version of IE for 70% of the hits. However 24% use Firefox which seems to be about the standard percentage for the last few years. I guess Firefox stooped gaining ground. Mozilla and Netscape are really just older versions of the Firefox engine. I don't recall what Safari is. Opera has been around for a while, and went completely free about two years ago.....

Software Operating Systems

I figured I would post a few charts showing what type of systems are being used to access interfacebus.com. The graphic attached to this posting depicts what type of operating system people use to access the web site. Windows tops the list at 95%, followed by Linux at 2%. I assume that most people running Unix are in a Windows Terminal, which would explain why SunOS and Unix don't really register in the chart. The chart covers Jan 1 to May 10 2007

Web Site Update Rate

I started adding a Google search bar to more pages on the web site and I noticed that by picking the pages that have not been updated in a while, just happened to be back in 11/11/06. Six months to cycle over pages in the web site. But with 1346 pages on the web site it's understandable. Of course some of these pages just contain pinouts or descriptions of older interface buses ~ facts that don't change. On the reverse, some pages on the site get updated time and again, as I add more data or correct the listings.

Any how, the search bar may help new visitors navigate the site. The attached pic shows how people find interfacebus.com, with 6% coming in as returning visitors. The numbers on the pie chart represent Apr 10 to May 10 2007. For a total of 200,914 visits over the last month.

Google Sitemaps

I ran Gsitemap again today and again it only reported about 938 pages. So instead of spending hours trying to figure out which pages were missing I went ahead a down loaded a new program. This new one is called GSiteCrawler. It seemed to work really good, as it found 1346 pages out there which is more than the 1206 pages I link to. GSiteCrawler did show a pop-up that it would asked Google what it showed for my site, so I assume it pulled in some orphaned pages and page redirects I have posted. The page redirects handle misspelled page addresses I see coming in from any number of forums.

Any way I will not know for sure if it worked right for a few hours or days. I also fixed a bug in my robots.txt file to correcly show the location of my sitemap to other search engines.

Wow, Google has already started reading the sitemap file, and agrees that there are 1346 submitted URLs ~ that's a good thing.

GSiteCrawler also produced a normal HTML siremap I could list on my web site, but the page address are not in alphabetic order ~ Maybe in the order they were spidered?

Hybrid Hard Disk Drive

Hybrid Hard Disk Drives are about the hit the market. Hybrid Hard Drives or HHD use either 125M Bytes or 256M Bytes of Flash memory as a cache to speed data thru-put. HHD devices are also set up to spin down the platter to save power as the data is only retrieved from the Flash memory.

Normally Hard Disk Drives only have a maximum of 16M Bytes of cache memory, so HHD come with at least 7 times more memory.

I don't list any manufacturers for Hybrid Hard Drives yet, but I'll start adding them as they come to market. I would assume that HHD devices will have an SATA interface.

DDR3 DIMM Memory

DDR 3 memory should be showing up soon in stores. DDR III is the third generation in the Double Data Rate series. DDR3 runs faster than DDR2 which tops out at 800Mbps. DDR3 will double that transfer rate and consume less power because it operates with 1.5 volts instead of 1.8 volts.

DDR4 is not due out until 2011, while DDR2 arrived in 2004. I've seen that the AM2 processor socket from AMD does not support the DDR3 memory. Also that the next new processor from AMD, called AM3 will not be released until 2008. However it would appear the an AM3 processor will work in an AM2 socket-ed Mother boards. Here are a few links:

Memory Modules [main page]
DDR3 Description
DDR2 Description
DDR1 Description
FB-DIMM
SSTL Signaling
DIMM Socket Manufacturers

Getting Listed on Google

There are a number of ways to get litsed on the Google search results:
1. If you blog, use Google Blogger ~ you will show up in a blog search and maybe a web search, but that depends on the key words.
2. Use Google Page Creator, for your web site. That's a Google site, so you will show up in a Google listing
3. Use the Google add a link to insert your link to the Google data base. Add your link to dmoz regardless.
4. Hit the Suggest a link out in dmoz.
5. Use Google Site Maps to get your site listed

Google Analytics Report

One of the reports that Google Analytics provides is a graphic of a page and the percentage of what link is clicked on. So for people reaching the index page of interfacebus.com these are the odds that one of the 8 main links are visited

Part Distrubutors = 1.99%
Components = 12.61%
Equipment = 3.85%
Software = 2.42%
Standards = 8.08%
Buses = 12.06%
Design = 4.90%
Reference = 4.59%

Pushing into the Components page, I find the follow click-thru's;
Semiconductor = 26.34%
Passive = 11.29%
Mechanical = 10.0%
Alphabetic Listing = 4.37%

Pushing into the Semiconductors page [three levels deep], I list the top 5 clicks;
Memory = 7.35%
Specialized IC's = 6.95%
Programmable Logic = 5.92%
Standard Logic = 5.05%
MicroProcessor = 5.04%
FETs [General] = 4.32%

Pushing into the Memory page [four levels deep];
Flash Memory = 8.46% [I just up-dated that page]

Checking my server stats:
Memory = 790 viewed pages for April
Specialized Logic = 153 viewed pages for April
Programmable Logic = 227 viewed pages for April
Standard Logic = 263 viewed pages for April

So the drill down from index to a specific page, does not tell how often a page is visited. I could spend days looking at these reports. This is one example of people finding my index page and clicking the links to get to the page they wanted, one example. I have 1200 pages, or 1200 different ways for a person to navigate the web site. Most visits start at some page other than the index page.

Site Traffic

Its been a while since I've posted the graphic showing the site traffic to interfacebus.com
The graph shows Unique Visitors to the site. A separate person showing up, and not re-counted if they come back.
Other stats; 'Number of Visits' = 1.32 visits/visitor, 1.89 pages/visit, 14.71 Hits/Visit

The chart covers Jan. 2001 to March 2007 with the highest point being 149,184 Visits in March. The large dip in 2005 occurred when I changed the site counter to my server.

More site data my be found on the FAQ page. So the site is still growing, and while being at a Page Rank of 5 for the last 8 months [after years with a PR of 6].

Total page impression for the year: 1,152,577.

AMD Pricing

The price for AMD processors are at an all time low. I saw an article the other day indicating that AMD had reduced your prices around 40%. So I got around to checking.

I pasted their list of dual core X2 processors as of today. I omitted the FX series [high end gaming PCs] and non-dual core [budget PC] series to keep the graphic from becoming to large. I assume these prices are in lots of 1000, and I don't think the PC makers are passing on the price yet. I would think they have a inventory to draw down first.

I think it's almost time to get a new PC, with a Dual-Core AMD processor..

Google Crawl rate

Here is a graphic for how Googlebot crawls the web site for the first 4 months of the year, interfacebus.com at an average of 325 pages a day, and a maximum of 723 pages crawled in one day. The site has around 1200 total pages. Click on the image to view a larger picture. The left axis shows the number of pages crawled per day. The top display shows the first three months of 2007. There are at least 48 other spiders [robots] that visit my web site.

This next graphic shows Apr to July of 2007, which was added 8/3/07



These pictures are from Google Site Maps

Web Stats

88% of the incoming hits [to interfacebus.com] from search engines are from Google. Yahoo is the next highest at 4.4%.

79% of the visitors are using Windows XP.
48% of the visitors are using MSIE 6.0.
28 different Robots hit the site just last night. The four using the largest amount of bandwidth for the month are; Inktomi Slurp, Google Adsense, MSNBot, and Googlebot. Total bandwidth consumed by the four spiders ~ 202.98MB
The top eight referring sites are all from wikipedia.
Total number of visits so far 86,286 with 162,817 page views using a bandwidth of 5.38GB

Analytics

Just a few details for site vists for the last seven days;
77.75% New Visitor, 22.25% Returning Visitor
By source;
79.28% Google, 6.10% direct, 3.77% Yahoo, 2.63% from MSN.

For the year, the numbers are all about the same ~ with in a 1/2 %.

For the year interfacebus.com had 642,023 visits, and 1,349,995 page views.

The attached pic shows the location most of the people come from....

IPMI Bus

I added three new pages tonight to cover intel's IPMI bus.
The Intelligent Platform Management Interface has been released for a few years now, and I don't know how I've missed it. I'll cover the topic now. The three pages are just a copy of the I2C bus for now, as a place holder. But over the week end I'll gear them up and address the topic. The new pages are located at these page addresses;

IPMI
IPMB
SMIC

The pages are just place holders....

Unrelated ~ I hear AMD is reducing the price of their processors next month. Must be time for a new computer. I think I run a dual core 4800 now ~ still over an AGP interface.

I need a PCIe 16x interface, SATA 2.0, flash hard drive, Windows Vista ~ I'm two years out-of-date......

Gmail

Just in case any one missed it Google has opened Gmail up to every one. I've been using Gmail for about a year, and I really like it. They catch a lot of spam in their filter. A calendar is also available.

The Gmail address aren't so bad either ~ interfacebus.com at gmail.com

You get 2831MB of space with Gmail......

Engineering Links, Employment, and Career Development Resources

A buddy of mine started a web site to cover Career Development
Seneea.com

New grads can start by checking out this page 'Start My Career', people already working can start by checking out 'Manage My Career'

I also listed that link on my Job listing page;
http://www.interfacebus.com/Engineering_Job_Search_Listing.html

My main page is located at:
http://www.interfacebus.com/
Which includes many engineering related topics.

Highest page hits in a month

Jan 2007 had the greatest amount of unique hits; with 148633 hits.
The previous high month was march of 2006, at 143841 hits.

http://www.interfacebus.com

Update; 1/30/2010, I just came across this posting and it needs an update. As of yesterday, Jan 2010 there have been 174,409 unique visitors to the web site, or 20,000 then when this posting which was made three years ago.
Here is one of the recent posts on page data: Web Stats Increasing. [Jan 20 2010].
Of course the data changes all the time, but the data from 2007 is out of date regardless.

Hit comparison

I just posted the hits for the year to the FAQ page of http://www.interfacebus.com
I noticed that the Unique visits up to Jan 7 of 2007 were 32,028 and the Unique visits for all of 1999 were 32,100. So in just 6 and 1/2 days I received as many visits as I did for all of 1999. In eight years the site has increased 50 times over. The FAQ is listed here; http://www.interfacebus.com/Faq-interfacebus.com.html

2006 Web Stats

www.interfacebus.com ended 2006 with 1,550,092 web visits and 3,688,317 page impressions. That's an increase of 381,770 visits from what the site received in 2005.

Over the year I've added a number of new pages, many during the last 6 months, so I expect 2007 to be even better. Of course I'm always trying to enhance the existing pages.

HTML Coding

I just noticed the other day that some of my HTML coding was only working in Explorer and not Firefox.

The code "font face ="symbol"" which I use to display the symbol for Ohm, or what ever, only works with Internet Explorer. In firefox, the alpha character and not the symbol is displayed.

Any how, I'm not going to fix it, because I don't know what the fix is. Not yet sure if this is invalid code or just an issue with firefox.....

Web Site Growing in Size

The web site is growing each day. Currently http://www.interfacebus.com has 1097 individual pages. There are also 68 old or orphaned page adderesses out there. With another 92 pages to redirect people from some of the more common mis-spelled addresess. This blog contains an additional 161 pages of information. My seconday page out on Google has another 30 pages for a total of over 1400 web pages.

Web Spider

Crawed Pages

This picture shows how the Google spider [googlebot] craws www.interfacebus.com over the last three months. It appears that most pages are hit and spidered with-in one day, than are spidered again during the month. The site has about 1040 pages as determined by the cached pages on Google; “site:interfacebus.com”. Those spikes appear to reach 800 to 850 pages.

Page Views

interfacebus.com passed the 3 million page view mark today with 3,004,376 page impressions for the year.

I estimate an additional 700,000 page views for the rest of the year.

The FAQ for interfacebus.com is located here;
http://www.interfacebus.com/Faq-interfacebus.com.html

Site Visits

I missed the day, but www.interfacebus.com passed last years unique visits of 1,168,322 for a new total of 1,200,959 unique hits so far this year, with two full months to go. The page views for this year so far are 2,870,317 different pages.

The difference is unique views are from different people, page views include the number of pages those people may have seen. Or, one person may click to another page on the site to double the page views....

So 1,200,959 people came by and looked at a total of 2,870,317 pages.....

Dual PCs

Now that I have the HP computer connected to the 28" LCD TV I started to use it more.
Having the two 19" monitors in front of me and the 28" TV off to the right is working out. I don't have to switch views as much with 3 screens.

More than once I have started to type on the wrong keyboard....

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 a government thing, I guess the FCC.

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

Any how version 1.0 came out last year from I understand and it 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.

Here is the new CableCARD listing.

PCIe Card Size

I added this page which shows the dimensions of the PCI Express Board
http://www.interfacebus.com/PCIe_Card_Dimensions.html

New Posts

More new pages added to www.interfacebus.com

The ZigBee page is blank, but I should get to it this week end.
http://www.interfacebus.com/IEEE802-15-4_ZigBee_Description.html

The Protocol Analyzer page also only has a few companies.
http://www.interfacebus.com/Test_Equipment_Protocol_Analyzer_Manufacturers.html
http://www.interfacebus.com/COTS_InfiniBand_Board_Manufacturers.html
Many of the InfiniBand products I'm finding are server boxes and not boards.
http://www.interfacebus.com/WaveGuide_Manufacturers.html
http://www.interfacebus.com/High_Definition_Audio.html

I should be up-dating each of these pages this week, or as I have more time.

Computer/TV interface

So I spent the day checking the computer in safe mode, defag, virus .... and did not find anything so I went ahead and did a HP restore.

It booted ok but with a bad video driver, so I put in an ATI CD. It turned out to be the wrong CD, so now when XP loads it a blank screen, and will not go into safe mode...

New Page Additions

I've been adding some new pages over the last few weeks;

http://www.interfacebus.com/HTX_Daughter_Card_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/COTS_VPX_Board_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/COTS_VXS_Board_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/Test_Equipment_Thermal_Imagers_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/GPS_Receiver_Manufacturers.html


http://www.interfacebus.com/WebCam_Manufacturers.html

Site Hits are down

Hits to www.interfacebus.com are down again this month. That's four months in a row. In most cases it's just droping 3000 a month, so it's really just down by a few hours to a day out of the month.

The issue is that it's down 4 months in a row.

PCI Express Cards

Manufacturers of PCI Express cards now has its own page;
PCIe card manufacturers. Most cards are video cards, but are few are not.

Those listings were on the main COTS board manufacturers page.

The site home page is here; interfacebus.com

Battery Manufacturers

In addition to the main listing for battery manufacturers, a new page was started that just covers Industrial Batteries

I also added a new page to cover Circuit Breaker Manufacturers, which is off the main Mechanical Fuse Manufacturers page.

I up-dated this page to show the new address for Circuit Breakers.

AMD AM2 Socket Motherboards

I added a new page which lists Motherboards that support the new AM2 socket processors from AMD. That page is listed on the AM2 MotherBoard Manufacturers page.

The main motherboard page lists all types of Main boards using either intel or AMD processors. That listing is located on the MotherBoard Manufacturers page [also listing embedded motherboards].

The AM2 processor replaces both the 940 socket and 939 socket processors. The AM2 processor socket also provides support for the DDR2 [DDRII] memory modules. BTW the AM2 processor socket also has 940 pins, but is not related to the 940-pin socket processor.

Of course AM2 processors are dual core. I don't think any new processor will be single core again.

Page Views

Of course I have alot of data about who and when people vist the web site. For some reason the web site hits have been up and down every other month for about four months now. May is a down month with around 120,098 visitors.

The strange thing about this month is that although visits are down 8,000 hits from last month, the page views are about the same. Last month had 306,683 page views and this month had 308,376 page views.

So I guess new web hits are down, but once I get a hit, more pages are visted.

The Google CTR is also down almost 1%, but that has to do with other issues.

WRT300 IEEE-802n Review

I went out again to see what people were saying about the new wireless-n spec devices

Now I see that some hardware chip manufaturers have issues with producing chip-sets to the draft standard, which really is very different then the 'just up-load new firmware' posts I've seen in the past.

Also that the IEEE.80211n specification is sensitive to environmental conditions which may explain the other negative posting I've have seen.

More over that the IEEE-80211n standard may interfere with IEEE-802.11g wireless networks ~ which I want to keep.

I only want to up-grade my wireless hub to IEEE-802.11n, keeping the rest of my system as IEEE-802g until I get a few dollars out of it 'g' devices.

So, again no wireless-n up-grade tonight. interfacebus: Linksys WRT300n Review

AM2 Socket's are out

I guess the new AMD processor socket is out. The 940-pin AM2 socket which replaces the 939-pin cpu socket.

I also understand AM2 motherboards are out.

I'll wait abit for an AM2 motherboard until I see some more options and read a few reviews.

The next up-grade is to get a new motherboard for my 5500 Alienware PC. The up-grade would be an AM2 Motherboard. The Am2 motherboard supports the DDR2 specification, but I really want to up-grade to it to support other AMD processor up-grades.

As an addition to the listing of Motherboard Manufacturers, I added a sperate page just to deal with AM2 MotherBoard Manufacturers.

Linksys WRT300n Review

So I wanted to upgrade my wireless router, which is a Linksys Wireless-B BEFW11S4. The BEFW11S4 operates using 802.11b technology ~ 10Mbps.

Two of the three reviews for the WRT300n I saw were negitive. So I'll take a pass tonight.

All my other gear is 802.11g, execpt the router. So just by geting the 802.11n router and operating it as a Wireless-G device I would up-grade my transmission speed from 10Mbps to 54Mbps.

More: interfacebus: WRT300 IEEE-802n Review

Listing of Wireless Routers

m7470n Review

I'm still really happy with the HP m7470n computer [AMD X2 4200+]. It does seem to be faster than the Alienware PC I was using [AMD 3800]. There are a few minor issues I do have with it.

First; the 300 watt power supply is pointless, it's not large enough to fully load the extra expansion slots on the PC ~ like adding a high end video card. Second; the documentation seems inaccurate. The HP site shows a m7470n populated with expansion cards which did not come on my computer. The store site indicates the PC has a video card, which it does not. Finally much of the front of the PC is dedicated to a large removable hard drive bay. I don't have an HP removable drive and don't really need one.

I like the fact it does not have a front door ~ I hated the door on the Alienware PC

I have yet to add the 10,000 rpm Raptor to the system yet. I have also not done anything with the TV card or any thing to do with multi-media ~ I just run a web site.

There are a few additional posts on the m7470n
interfacebus: New Video Card

interfacebus: On-Board Video

interfacebus: New Computer

My only other comment concerns Open Office which I use on this PC. Seems really slow, but I am not using the quick start option. Open Office did not come with the HP PC, I loaded that software.

Be careful with card additions; I think I'm allowed 10 watts per slot. The video card I added uses around 70 watts. It was the lowest grade video card at the store with two video inputs ~ still a good card.

Listing of Computer Manufacturers

New AMD Socket

Both my desk top computers use the AMD Socket 939 processor. The socket 939 accepts either a Single or dual core AMD processor, and DDR I memory sticks.

The next generation AMD socket is called the AM2 socket. The AM2 socket comes in a 940-pin package and supports either DDR I or DDR II [DDR2] memory modules. The AM2 processor socket has the same cache size as the Socket 939 processor.

There are a number of AM2 processor speeds, I only list the higher grade ones I may up-grade to:
AMD Athlon 64 FX-62: 2.8GHz clock, 1MBx2 L2 Cache, 125W
AMD Athlon 64 FX-60: 2.6GHz clock, 1MBx2 L2 Cache, 125W
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+: 2.6GHz clock, 512kB x2 L2 Cache,89 watts
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 2.4GHz clock speed, 1MB x2 L2 Cache, 89 watts

So the Alienware PC is using an AMD 3800 single core processor, while the HP m7470n PC is using an AMD Dual core 4200 processor.

The next up-grade will be a new motherboard for the Alienware 5500 to accept the new AMD processor socket AM2. Moving to the new AM2 motherboard may keep the up-grade current for a longer amount of time. The difference between DDR I and DDR II makes no difference from the numbers I've seen.

Laptop Power Inverter

I picked up that auto power inverter for the notebook computer tonight. The unit is a 140 watt adapter; 12 volt vehicle power to 120 volt AC moble power.

The power inverter is made by CyberPower, model # CPS140BI with a 180 degree swivel head, one 3 prong AC plug, a green power/surge LED [surge protected].

The specifications are;
Output Voltage: 120 Vac, 60Hz
Output Power: 140 watts [Continuous power]
Input Voltage: 10.8Vdc to 15.8V DC
Input Current: 12A max

Normally power inverters provide the maximum instantanious current [power] in large font, and it's up to the buyer to insure it will handle the user's Continuous power requirements. This unit only gives the Continuous power, leaving the maximum power to be computed; 12 Amps x 15.8 volts = 189.6 watts.

The HP ze4805wm laptop PC uses 75.05 watts: 19Vdc x 3.95A

I turned the car on, pluged the unit in and powered-up the laptop. I let the PC boot up and then I turned it off. I didn't notice any heat coming off the power inverter.

Power inverter manufacturers
Laptop manufacturers

The CyberPower CPS140BI cost me $29.94. The weight must be 3 pounds lighter then the unit I did have. Also this fits in the console, while the older Vector Force 350 unit needed to be placed on the floor under your feet.

Power Inverter

I have a Vector Force 350 [VEC024] power inverter I use to power the laptop for car trips. The Vector supplies 350 watts to 2 AC outlets. The unit is 6" x 8", and about 3 inches high; Aluminum construction with one small fan.

I saw this really small plastic power inverter at the store, swivel head, 140 watts. I didn't get it because I wasn't sure what the notebook current draw was. The unit didn't have any weight to it, which bets the 3 or 4 pounds of the Vector.

The HP ze4805wm requires 3.95 amps from 19 volts dc, or 75.05 watts.

I started a page listing for Portable Power Inverter Manufacturers.

The main page for the web site is interfacebus.com

New Wireless Card

Now that my Alienware computer is my secondary system, I added a Wireless card to it to allow the computer access to the network.

I added a PCI Adapter; Wireless G card [with SRX]. SRX is the Speed/Range eXpansion providing upto 8x faster, and 3x farther coverage. Sounds about right, as the computer sees 5 other wireless networks outside my house ~ which it did not see before.

Of course with all other Linksys products I have it does not work out of the box. I loaded the CD/Software as per instruction, then the hardware after a power down/up. But the CD never auto ran at start-up, and it will not let me back in with out reloading the driver again....

The PCI expansion card is the Linksys WMP54GX which is compatible with Wireless-B 802-11b, and Wireless-G 802.11-G; 2.4GHz

Of course this is some of the equipment used to generate the interfacebus.com web site. interfacebus is a trade mark of interfacebus.com

New Video Card

I added a new video card to the HP m7470n PC tonight. I added an ATI Radeon X 1300 Pro video card with 256MB of RAM and supplying one VGA port and one DVI port.I need the two ports to handle the two LCD monitors I use. I also understand that the on-board VGA connector will accept another monitor but I have not attempted that yet. I did not go into the BOIS to disable that other video connection as described in the doc's.
The HP m7470n does appear to be faster than the Alienware PC it replaces, but I'm still working with it. ~ loading software and files. The HP computer is now my main computer [for now].

The Alienware is just behind me running on a single 17" LCD, while I use the HP7470 on two 19" LCD screens. The room is some-what cool at 81.5 F, with the AC and fan running, but the exit air from the HP is 101.3F. Normally the Alienware exit air would be up 10F.

The HP only comes with a 300 watt power supply which is vary disappointing for a PC over $1000. The PC's I looked at on-line were all 600W.

I think, just by plugging in the new video card I'm over driving the Power supply! An empty slot but you can only plug in a $25 video card ~ so why up-grade at all.....


Status update; I ended up giving the computer away about a year and half later.
That was a nice video card though.

A few months ago I finally end up giving the Alienware computer away too.

And I also no longer see a need for a VGA input.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Graphic; ATI Radeon X 1300 Pro video card.

On-Board Video

So I popped the cover on the HP Pavilion m7470n PC and it does not have a video card. The store doc indicated that there was one 16x PCIe slot and it was occupied [by the video card], but the slot is empty, and I see the ATI ASIC on the Motherboard. That's the reason for the VGA connector up near the I/O connectors. Also the reason for the video memory indicated as shared ~ meaning that there is no video memory, it shares the main memory.

This was the highest price computer the store had in stock. I don't mind having to buy a video card, but now I have to worry about fit issues.

There are no spare slots for another hard drive, but they do provide for a bottom mounted HD to the bottom of the chassis. SATA connector is there, providing a slot for my 10,000 rpm drive.