Robot Visits

Out looking at Google sitemaps and I grab a picture of the spider visits to interfacebus from GoogleBot. Seems over the last few months the minimum number of pages spidered per day is on the increase. Not sure why more pages are being checked, but at least that means that Google has the most current version of my pages.

Here is the previous blog about Google Crawl Rate. That page shows the crawl rate from January to June 2007.

So far this month the robot using the most server bandwidth was Google Adsense, followed by Yahoo Slup, Voila, and MSNBot. GoogleBot was the eight down the list. Looks like the Voila robot is from France. A total of 76 different spiders have hit the site this month.

Low page hits

So I took a closer look at pages that are getting very few hits via Google Analytics. I did find a few pages that were generated but never developed. I added those pages that still need content to my to-do list, about 20 odd pages. I didn't add any additional contents to the 'blank' pages but I did try to up-grade the other pages, about 30 additional pages.

The attached graphic shows visits from India to interfacebus.com. The cool thing about these graphic reports is that you can mouse over the cities to get a name and the number of visits coming in from each city. Not that it matters but you can also tell the location of the industrial centers in a country.....

Why Blog

Here are some of the major reasons why I blog, spending time here instead of up-dating the web site. The attached graphic depicts visits per city for the United Kingdom [UK] from Jan 01 to Sep 11, 2007.


Top ten reasons to blog if you run a web site:

1. Increase the number of external pages pointing to your web site.
2. Generate pages that are search-able from Blogger.
3. Generate pages that are search-able from the Google Blog index.
4. Add content and topics that do not fit into the 'facts only' website.
5. Add web 2.0 content via the comments button in the blog.
6. Forum to discuss website topics [hits, SEO, site issues....]
7. Add graphics that have the site name embedded within the gif.
8. Increase the # of pic files that are search-able via Google image search.
9. Blogger allows RSS Feeds.
10. Space to highlight troubled pages ~ low hits, no page rank, new pages ......

The blog does not take any of my server space or server bandwidth, and its free.....

Added Some new pages

I ran GSiteCrawler again tonight to generate a new site map to account for a half dozen new pages that have been added over the last few weeks. Google reports 1418 URLs submitted in the sitemap. With 1,290 pages currently in the index, but only 1,000 in the main index.
AWSats reports 1,291 pages.
MSN Live Search reports 3,674 [ site:www.interfacebus.com]
The map is generated from Google Analytics for www.interfacebus.com.

Other than new pages; these are some of the worst performing pages;
FTTH: it's still a blank page
Water Alarm Manufacturers:
Display Acronyms:
Chassis Parts:
Environmental Alarm Manufacturers:
PCI-104 Board Manufacturers:

There are always pages that don't do well.

Interface Buses

I ran TouchGraph again, this time using the term 'interface buses'. Only two of the smaller clouds are sites other than interfacebus.com. That's 'Serial' and 'System Bus'......

So for a major term like interface buses, Google associates most of my pages to the term ~ that's a good thing.

Updated Visits Chart

It's been a few months since the posting of the unique visits graph. Aug had 133,516 unique visits, 193,004 total visits and 325,100 page views [according to AWStats].

It appears that the site has plateaued at about 135,000 unique visits, at least for the last year and half.

Google Adsense reports 293,172 page impressions, however 3% of people visiting the web site do not have Java enabled. This blog only gets 1,266 page impressions a month which is part of the Adsense data. Google Analytics reports 368,260 page views for Aug, with 3,086,130 pageviews, for the year.

TouchGraph Cloud

Went out and found the TouchGraph Google Browser. "The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites."

It reports the same data Google provides but in a graphic instead of a list. I used the keyword www.interfacebus.com to run the report. interfacebus is in the center of the map.

It looks cool, not that I have time to do any thing with the data~

PCI-104 Form Factor

Following along a previous posting about the slow adoption of new interface bus standards, I have yet another one. Upgrading the page that covers PC104 board manufacturers and separating out vendors that produce only PCI104 cards, I don't find that many companies producing PCI/104 boards.

The attached graphic shows the road-map [up-grade path]. The PC104 standard started out with an IBM XT bus interface in a 90mm x 96mm board format in 1992. Following that release, the IBM AT bus interface was added a few years later. Then in 1997 the PCI bus interface was added to reside along side the PCAT bus, as a new connector. With each upgrade board area was reduced because of the increase in the number of connectors. However; card-to-card transmission speed increased as the interface buses increased their throughput.

The PCI104 specification was released in 2003. The change here was to leave the PCI interface, now common, and remove the connectors and interfaces dedicated to the out-dated PCAT bus which than freed up board space.

Odd that there are still not that many PCI/104 board vendors. The stack height is reduced form 6 cards to 4 cards, but they may still be stacked using the PCI104 standard. Could it be that the CPU card is the only CCA that requires a PCI interface, while all the other I/O cards don't benefit from being redesigned? Maybe the increased density of FPGAs compensated for the reduced board area? Perhaps most OEMs require a 6-card stack in a PC/104 chassis. What ever the reason, the original PC bus lives on......

Graphic; The different connector locations for each PC/104 board format.

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.

Note this posting was updated on Jan 8 2010 [The Demise of CableCard].

Terms:

IDTV: integrated digital televisions
DCT: Digital Cable Tuner
OCUR: OpenCable Unidirectional Receiver
DIY: Do-it-yourself

Link Exchange

Get a lot of e-mail from other sites wanting to link exchange, most are all spam. The most common type are asking to link to one site while they have yet a third site link back to me. The two e-mails today called it one-way linking, or triangular linking, it's a scam. They want a link from me [A] to point to their site [B] to improve the page rank of 'B'. However, site [C] normally has no page rank and does not help [A].

Link exchanges should be from 'X' to 'Y' and then 'Y' to 'X'

Site 'C' is what is called a link farm, and normally will not do your site any good. Also 'B' never even points to 'C' and my be a third party site altogether. The over all purpose of the scam is to get sites pointing to 'B' with out 'B' looking like a Link farm.

My response is to hit the Report Spam button in G-mail. Stay away from link farms!

Google supplemental index

Google has a couple of different indexes, its main index and the supplemental index. Google considers pages in the supplemental index as less important to normal pages. Or its nearly impossible for pages in this index to be returned during a search unless very few other pages match the search criteria. interfacebus has 136 pages in the supplemental index, out of another 1,230 pages in the normal index.

Many of the pages in the supplemental index are orphaned pages [old pages no longer used], and 'Bad Address' pages [pages that redirect misspelled addresses]. However many pages are also normal pages with no real issue and really should not be listed there. Here are a few of the pages:
Military D-Sub Connector Manufacturers
Stepper Motor Manufacturers
Linear Actuator Manufacturers
Circuit Breaker Manufacturers
Real Time Clock Manufacturers
CompactFlash Card Pinout


This is just a few of the pages, most don't have a page rank. One reason for ending up in the supplemental index ~ the page looks like another page. This is common to have near redundant content; for example when the Linear Actuator page was started using the Motor page as a starting point.

It appears it's getting a bit harder to determine which pages are listed in the supplemental index, this is the command I used to determine the page listing;
site:www.interfacebus.com/&

Site Overlay

Just figured I'd post a graphic showing how one of the many different things Google Analytics provides in terms of data. This one shows the Visits-site-overlay, who clicks on what link.

A bar is provided under every link on the page indicating the percentage of people clicking on that link [that's the home page]. In this case the Google Search bar is high lighted.

So on any given page you can tell how the traffic moves about your site. All the links still work in this mode, so you can still click a link and see how the traffic moves on the following page...

No Page Rank

I came across a page on the site yesterday that does not yet have a Google Page Rank. The page covers RF Phase Detector Manufacturers. ~ Not very well because the page only lists one manufacturer.

Any how I always assume waiting 4 months to receive a page rank, maybe 5 if the spider is running late. The 'Last Modified' date on the page is 3/17. All the other pages in that section already have a ranking: RF Device Manufacturers.

The Phase Detector page shows up in a Google search so I know its been spidered?

Of course all the new pages added with in the last few months don't have a page rank either, but I expect that.

SiteMap error

I was out looking at Google Site map yesterday.The Diagnostic tab indicated there were 20 URL's not found. Eleven of the bad URLs were new pages ~ the reason for up-loading the new sit map.

Any way, those pages all used spaces in the address. I don't use spaces in the URL, so I must have been in a hurry when I generated those page addresses. So I changed the name adding dashs in place of the spaces and re-uploaded the files, leaving the original files out on the server.

Now Google indicates I submitted 1405 URLs, while the previous up-load indicated 1359 URLs. I had generated a few new pages, but I don't recall making 40. Maybe GSiteCrawler didn't like the spaces either.

Hmm; The programs Statistics indicate:
Number of URLs listed: 1406
Number of URLs to be crawled: 1061
Number aborted: 2 [checking those errors now]

Because the crawler puts a heavy load on my server, it has to pull every page. I only run GSiteCrawler on the off-hours.

The attached pic shows incoming visits from Virginia so far this year

AWStats is off-line

For the last three days AWStats has been down, I just return a server error page. AWStats is what I use to track hits to the web site. The attached graphic is from Webalizer which is the other server side counter that provides data; however I like AWStats.

I just submitted a trouble ticket.

In addition to the two server side tracking programs there are two additional programs tracking web site data. Google Adsense provides page views, and Google Analytics which gives all sorts of data.

Webalizer indicates [for Aug] that there have been 2,294 Internal Server Error codes returned [Code 500].

Blog Feed Burner Stats

Hmm blog hits are down. Could be more people are reading the RSS feed rather than the blog it self. Google reports only 22 hits for Sunday and no hits for Monday, as of 7pm.
This first graph is subscribers, while the second chart is visitors.... Both pictures are from FeedBurner.

Hurricane Dean

Hurricane Dean is out of the picture at this point. A partial back-up was completed to Flash Drive. I still need to back up to CD, but I have a 1GB Flash drive ready as well.

I never rely on the server as back-up only because there is no was to guarantee what version of any page they may have.

I came across a file today that was generated in March but was not on the server. This is common, many times I'll up-load a group of files to the server only to find that half of them didn't make it. The bad thing is that because I don't want to skew my stats I don't check the pages that were just up-loaded.

Site visits from Florida

One more map, this time showing the details from Florida. The largest incoming visits [hits] are from Orlando (13,337), Miami (10,243), Tampa (9,959), and Melbourne (7,815). The figures are from mid last year till today. I signed up for Google Analytics in April 5 2006. Additional data for the state:


Total Visits: 64,096

Pages/Visit: 2.28

Average Time on Site: 7:20

Percent New Visits: 70.79%

Google Analytics really provides a lot of data. I recommend using it. A few lines of code are required to be added to each page.

Google Sitemap

I made a few new pages over the last few weeks so it's time to generate and up-load a new site map to Google. Part of Google's Webmaster Tools, Google sitemaps allows a web site to generate an XML sitemap of a site and up-load it to Google. By uploading the XML file, Google is informed about all the pages within a site. In most cases this is faster than waiting for GoogleBot to come by and spider the new page.

I assume, based on the number of pages that get spidered daily, that a spider will find the new page within 15 days. Maybe the spider will find it in 30 days worst case.

Because it takes 4 months to be assigned a page rank by Goolge it's always better to get the new page noticed as soon as possible. Also the faster the page gets spidered the sooner it will show up in a Google search ~ web search and site search.

I use GSiteCrawler to spider the site and generate an XML Sitemap which I then upload to Google. I also link to the site map from the Robots.txt file so all the other search engines read the map as well.

This XML site map differs from the sites HTML sitemap which is generated from Xenu. The Xenu application is used to spider the site and report on broken links, it just happens to also generate a list of all the pages on the site as part of its report I use that portion of the report to produce a sitemap page for interfacebus.com. That sitemap is located out on the Google Page Creator section of the site.



The Google cache reports 1,220 pages for interfacebus.com. The previous site map up-loaded on April 29 shows 1,346 pages. So not all pages have made it into the listing yet. This crawl from GSiteCrawler indicates 1,360 pages. So 15 pages have been added over the last 3 months. This second graphic is a zomed in version of the first picture, showing just the hits coming from the US.

Hurricane moving west

Looks like Tropical Storm Dean is moving west past Florida. So if Dean hits this site it should be coming from across the state which means just strong winds.

Standard procedure is to back-up the system. Consolidating the folders so files in folders that don't get backed up are backed up. Saving the files both to a Flash drive and to the Laptop PC that would travel on the evacuation.

Don't rely on the server for storage. If the server crashes the site provider may re-load from a back-up. However; the server may re-load older pages, out-dated pages. So, it's always a good idea to be ready to have up-to-date files to re-load to the server.

New Interface Standards

PCI Express has been out for a few years now and there are a fair number of PCIe 16x board manufacturers. What seems to be missing is 1x card manufacturers. interfacebus has only accounted for 6 different companies that produce 1x boards.

LXI is another new standard which came out in 2005 for industrial use. However; only 2 companies have been located that produce LXI gear.

Yet another industrial specification released in 2005 was PXIe. The PXIe is the PCI Express version of the PXI standard. PXI is the Instrumentation version of cPCI. Compact PCI is the industrial version of PCI.

Released in 2006; Compact TCA [cTCA] is another one with out many vendors yet......

There are many other new standards that have been coming out in the last year or so. Most are off-shoots of old standards that are beginning to adapt the PCIe interface [Industrial Board Formats & Manufacturers].

New Feeds from FeedBurner

It's been a dozen days since signing up for RSS using Feedburner. The chart shows the subscribers per day for the last few weeks. Google reports a slight drop in blog hits which could be due to users reading the blog via the feed, and not going to the physical blog page.
I assume this is new subscribers per day, but it may indicate users reading the feed per day ~ I have no idea. The low is 8 subscribers, with the high is 12; Sunday 8/13 [dark green].
By signing up for a feed the blog risks losing ad revenue, but may gain some via increased visits ~ it's a risk.

I don't use a counter for this blog. I use the Google AdSense reports from interfacebus.com. So the Feedburner stats provide data on pages viewed, origin and so on. This blog is "in the noise" compared to the web pages of www.interfacebus.com. This blog may get 1000 hits a month while a single page on the web site may get 8000 a day. I'm not even sure the report gets to a page that only receives 50 hits a day ~ it's truncated.

Interestingly I see that this blog has hits from around the world and hits to pages that were written a year ago

Moore's Law

Looking over Intel's site today and came acrossed a few pages dedicated to Moore's Law ~ the amount of transistors doubles ever two years. Current Intel processors have over 500,000,000 transistors, or over 1,000,000,000 for a dual core.

Much of that is redundant circuity, one small memory block used again and again to build a large buffer for example.

Even so these processors are large design efforts, with a 100,000 circuits

Page Views

The web site past the 1,000,000 page mark some time yesterday with 1,009,338 unique views ~ according to the server counter. Google Analytics reports 1,092,341 unique visitors with 2,827,189 page views

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.