Engineering Dictionary

I took a look at how a section of the web site was doing, in this case the Electronic Dictionary section.

Here are the page views by month:




Jan: 8,254
Feb: 8,046
Mar: 8,814
Apr: 8,584
May: 7,974
Jun: 7,183
Jul: 6,707
Aug: 7,427
Sep: 9,270
Oct: 11,269

I can't tell yet if the increase in page impressions is due to adding additional pages to that section, or what. This month has 5,914 page views so far from about 279 different pages. I didn't take the time to look up how many pages made of the Glossaries section in previous months.

Update [9/23/09]; I'm not really sure what I'm counting here? There is a very small section that uses the term 'dictionary' in the address but that only amounts to a few web pages. A much larger section using the term 'glossary' in the web address is out there, but those pages do not add up to the numbers listed above either [as in Engineering Glossary].

So I no longer know what these numbers represent, maybe the addition of all the different dictionary sections? I really don't know! lets disregard this posting from now on........ Editor

Oh, the graphic is copied from the Dictionary of Capacitor Terms..

Super Bright LED diodes-

Ever see those traffic signs that use dozens of LEDs instead of an incandescent bulb. Well you should expect to see them more and more. As of Jan 2006 the government imposed a maximum wattage the traffic signal could use, 17 watts, which is much less that a comparable 130 watt incandescent lamp. Many of the traffic signals were traded out years ago

These Bright LED modules cost more than there incandescent counterparts, but also last ten years instead of the two years for incandescent's.

Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
Any traffic signal module or pedestrian module manufactured on or after January 1, 2006, shall meet both of the following requirements:
(a) Have a nominal wattage no greater than: [only higher wattage for 74C is shown]
12" Red Ball ........................................... 17 watts
8" Red Ball ............................................. 13 watts
12" Red Arrow ...................................... 12 watts
12" Green Ball ....................................... 17 watts
8" Green Ball ......................................... 13 watts
12" Green Arrow .................................. 12 watts
Combination Walking Man/Hand ...... 16 watts
Walking Man ......................................... 12 watts
Orange Hand ......................................... 16 watts
(b) Be installed with compatible, electrically connected signal control interface devices and conflict monitoring systems.

Pedestrian module means a light signal used to convey movement information to pedestrians.
Traffic signal module means a standard 8-inch (200 mm) or 12-inch (300 mm) traffic signal indication that—
(1) Consists of a light source, a lens, and all other parts necessary for operation; and
(2) Communicates movement messages to drivers through red, amber, and green colors.

LED light sources for traffic signals offer significant energy savings over incandescent lamps. LED signals also last much longer than incandescent signals (7 to 10 years instead of 2 years) and fail less frequently. The additional benefit is the reduced power consumption (10 to 22 Watts) for LED bulbs compared to the typical energy consumption of incandescent bulb (135 Watts); the savings from the low energy use of LED signals can be 80% to 93% and will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

... If all of the three million traffic signals in the United States were converted to LEDs, some three billion kilowatt-hours of electricity would be saved annually ..... Electricity is generated by coal or nuclear plants, so oil imports aren't effected.

You can also find these bright LEDs in flash lights and in normal 'light bulb' configurations [Edison Screw Base]. However many still insist that fluorescent bulbs provide a better alternative to an incandescent bulb. The amount of light given off and it's relative color are two reasons why a Super Bright LED lamp does not fit well in some in-door light applications. LED bulbs also cost more to operate than fluorescent bulbs.

FeedBurner Subscribers

Feedburner is the feed used so that a newsreader can be used to view this blog.

The graphic shows which reader is used as the news reader. Most use Firefox [50%], which is interesting because, most people that visit the web site use Internet Explorer [69.47%].

Feedburner is just another way to get the word out about the blog

Xenu's Link Sleuth

I ran Xenu today checking for bad links. Here is part of the full report:

ok	5758 URLs	99.21%
user skip	1 URLs	0.02%
no such host	11 URLs	0.19%
not found	8 URLs	0.14%
no info to return	1 URLs	0.02%
server error	2 URLs	0.03%
no connection	9 URLs	0.16%
no object data	1 URLs	0.02%
forbidden request	7 URLs	0.12%
timeout	4 URLs	0.07%
the resource is no longer available	1 URLs	0.02%
auth required	1 URLs	0.02%
Total	5804 URLs	100.00%

Memory size boards

I added a few pages tonight. One new page included DIMM form factors, or DDR II card sizes. In addition to that page, a number of pages were also added which may be found at the site's new up-dates page.

Because of the dozen new pages over the last few weeks, Google was informed with a new up-loaded site map. GSiteCrawler reported 1202 pages to be crawled, with 1562 pages included in the site map.

I also removed a few Linkshare banners. I'd received an e-mail indicating an ad campaign had come to an end ~ didn't know if that ment the banners would go away or what, so I just removed the banners. This site is not making any money from Linkshare any way, so no harm done.

Norton Anti-Virus Review

I use Norton on one of my computers to work as anti virus software.

There are defiantly two things I don't like about Norton Anti-virus.

First, the computer takes forever to boot up. Norton always wants to down load it's latest virus definition each time I turn the computer on ~ well sometimes I would like to get some work done. I run only high-end computers, and I would always like to have the most up-to-date software. But I would sometime like to sit down and use the computer.

Second; many times norton upgrades it self, it wants a re-boot. Well I'm five minutes into working on the computer after waiting 5 minutes for the boot up time. Than I get a message, Norton want to upgrade ~ well ok. When you say yes to the up-date, you get re-booted. I canceled out buy hitting the 'x' on the window, not saying yes, but the system still started to reboot.

Who thinks this crap up? Maybe it time to look around for another software package.

AWSTATS

Not much going on, just normal site up-dates.

I did start a new blog to handle site updates, to indicate when new pages are added. It's another blogger site called serial interface buses. I had been using a blog out on windows live called interfacebus.com updates. I'm not sure if I'll keep updating the MS site or not.

The chart shows data collected from AWSTATS.

Unique Visitor:
A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once. The period shown by default is the current month. Average = 138,158
Visits:
Number of visits made by all visitors.
Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the "pages" are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor. Average = 198,380
Pages:
The number of "pages" logged. HTML files. Average = 344,807

Server Bandwidth

I took a look at webalizer, one of the counters located on the server.

I notice that the header pic used for the Dictionary section and Alphabetic Manufacturers sections of the web site used 738949 kBytes or 756,683,776 bytes! The jpg is a 112 kbyte graphic. So I loaded the graphic up to Google pages and changed the CSS file controlling those sections to grab the file from Google pages and not from my server. That should save my server from down loading 700 MBytes each month.

The Dictionary section had 9,941 page impressions, and the Manufacturers section had 1,860 page impressions last month. I think the How-To Design an Equipment Chassis section also used that format, another 1,158 impressions. Any other section that used the same CSS file will automatically switch over.

I also change this blog template so that the icons shown at the bottom of these pages come from Google Pages and not from my server.

The server provides 50 GBytes of bandwidth, and the site only uses about 15 GBytes, so there was no danger of being fined for exceeding the bandwidth limit. However what this does is take the strain of the server, so files are coming in from two different servers making the page show up faster ~ assuming both servers are working correctly.

I also changed the HTML code on each of the main Dictionary sub-sections so they grab there navigation icons from Google, there are several sections covering different topics.

Site Visits

October's data is in:
146,700 Unique visitors
219,642 Total visits
350,920 Viewed pages
2,981,629 Hits

I'm not really sure what the difference is between Hits and Page views ..
Total unique visits for the year: 1,381,584

Page views are twice this number, see the Nov 4 post.

Serial Bus Page

So I've added 41 pages up to serialphy.
As of today there have been 291 page impressions.
The site is using Google Analytics to track visitors. I up-loaded a site map to Google, but it's not reporting any data yet. I also used the Add a Site link for Google.

And, I added a link from interfacebus.com to the site, and added the site to Yahoo's index.
I tried to add it to MSN but the page would not let me, must be broke. So I'll have to wait until the MSNBot reads this blog.....

Domain Registration

So the guy from China got back to me. They registered those domain names, "it was his duty". The company that wanted to purchase them was not mentioned in the e-mail. It appears the Server company got them, and than parked them ~ he sent in the Whois data.

It's a scam and I don't expect to hear from him again. A company wants my domain name, via a registrar, but instead the registrar purchases the names and parks the page; Hmm.

It's only a few hundred dollars to start an ICANN protest, some day when I have time I'll close these bozos down.

On the up-side ~ people see the domain generating a great many visits!

Topic update [9/23/09] As I figured I never got another email from these guys. I'm not about to check out any site with out a dot.com on the end of it, so I never went out and checked if they are using the site or just parked it. Ya know, I never touch a site that does not have a dot com or dot net. Of course I'll check out a dot org, edu or gov website...... I assume people living in those countries don't have an issue going to their own web extension, but I sure do.

Photo credit; US Military government, a B1 bomber.

Domain Name

I received an e-mail early this morning from a registrar in china. They indicated that a company [who they named] wanted to purchase interfacebus.com, .net, and .org all with the .cn suffix [interfacebus.com.cn]

Of course I wrote back and indicated that interfacebus was my trademark and business name and should not be used. They followed with an email that said I misunderstood, they were giving me a chance to purchase those domain names prior to the other company registering them.... Translated, you buy it now [at what price] or we will use it.

In May of 2006 I received a similar email regarding interfacebus.eu, except that they had already registered it, placed ads on the page and wanted me to purchase the domain name after the fact. "we're making money running ads, so you may want to purchase your tradmark in the .eu domain.....

I've been out to the ICANN site a number of times [Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy]. The two most common reasons for someone losing a domain address;

1. Infringing on another's Trademark [which both of these companies do].
2. Purchasing a domain name in bad faith; trying to resale a domain name once it's purchased to harm another company [which both of these companies are doing].

So if you purchase a domain name thinking, I'll sell it to company 'x' because it looks like this other companies name. Well, you just purchased that name in bad faith and will lose that name with no profit.

The e-mails go like this;
Incoming: we want to or will use the term interfacebus
Outgoing: That's my trademark and business names
Incoming: Want to purchase your name in the dot-what ever domain
Outgoing: Don't register my trademark as your domain
Than the emails stop coming in...........

ESD Details

I added a few pages to cover ESD terms. Definitions for many Electrostatic Discharge terms, much more than what is ESD, or what does ESD mean. The following links are the main new ESD pages;

ESD Terms, A to C
ESD Terms, E to El
ESD Terms, Es
ESD Terms, H to Z
ESD Military and Commercial standards that cover ESD issues
Static/ESD Label Manufacturers

Because of the additional ESD pages, a number of other pages also changed:
Listing of Dictionary and Acronyms pages
Acronyms, EME to EOW, cut the page in half
Acronyms, eP to Ex, Added link to ESD
Glossary of Terms E to Ed, cut the page in half
Glossary of Terms Ee to El, cut the page in half
Glossary of Terms Es to Eu, added link to ESD
Mechanical Supplies, added link to ESD Labels

So any way I counted the number of pages related to interfacebus.com and came up with this:
Web Pages: 1310, located on interfacebus.com
Google pages: 14, up-loaded to Google page creator
Blog posts: 268 posting to Interfacebus Blogger
MS Blog posts: 21, blog just lists new page additions
Orphan pages: 75 page addresses no longer used [never delete an address]
Bad Address: 116 pages used to capture mis-spelled page addresses
Total pages: 1,828 related to interfacebus.com
1,458 URLs submitted via the sitemap to Google
10,623 External links to interfacebus.com from the web
854 External links to interfacebus.com from the Google Groups
127 External links to interfacebus.com from Blogger

External Links per Page

Here are a few pages that only have one external link. One link from a page other than from its own web site. Normaly the one out-side link is from the sitemap. Listing the page addresses here will provide yet another external link, to support the page.
Power IC's
AMC Mezzanine Board Pinout
ASIC IC Manufacturers

ATCA Chassis Manufacturers

Obsolete Apple buses;
Apple Computer AUI Pinout
Apple IIc Joystick Pinout
Apple RS232 DB9 Pinout

Industrial Board Formats;
COM-144 Board Manufacturers
COM_Board_Manufacturers
COM-ETX Board Manufacturers
EBX Board Manufacturers
ECX Board Manufacturers
EPIC Board Manufacturers
ESB Board Manufacturers
ETX Board Manufacturers
ETXexpress Board Manufacturers
miniITX_Manufacturers
nanoITX_Manufacturers
These are pages from the first 100 out of 1201. So 16 out of the first 100 only had one link pointing to them. All the 1201 pages have 10,623 combined pages pointing to them. Of course there are a number of pages with 100's of external links coming in, but most pages just have a few dozen.

Site Up-date Rate

Web Page Update rate:

So how do web site pages get up-dated. There are a number of reasons a page may be up-dated; however if the update is to a hidden HTML error, or a new Ad format, the "Last Modified" date at the bottom of the page may not change.
The "Last Modified" text is only changed if a visitable portion of the content is updated.


E-mail comments may cause a page to be up-dated immediately, or if I happen to read it but take no action, stay in the cue for months.

Documentation errors will definitely result in a page being up-dated.

Low page visits may also cause the page to be updated. The server counter provides this data.

Under construction pages: I keep a list of about 20 pages at a time. I add this page type to get the page address indexed by search engines because it takes 3 months to get a page rank. Of course there is a disclaimer at the top of the page indicating a "blank" page. I don't see an issue of adding a holding page as long as it's kept to 20 of 1,200 pages.

Old Pages: Pages that have not been up-dated in a while. Just sort the html files by 'Data Modified'. A few years ago I noticed that as a page dropped in the rankings, one way to increase it's ranking would be to increment the saved-as date.

So some days I may work on new content, while other days work on pages under one or more of the above topics.

The cycle time is more than a year to work through all the web pages.........

Quantcast data

The data from Quantcast is coming in now. Some of the numbers look low, so I'll add the code to the top few pages ~ that receive the most hits:
AWG Sizes, 9797 hits in Sep.
CAN Bus, 7345 hits in Sep.
USB Bus. 6873 hits

Along with the 10,263 hits from the index page Quantcast should start to see better results. I don't really care, but any one else can check that data so I would like it to at least be in the ball-park.

Oh, last month had 136, 218 hits for the month, with 3,210,056 page views.

Quantcast Site Tracking

I found a new traffic counting web site yesterday called Quantcast. Just like Google Analytics which I already use, Quantcast tracks site visits. Quantcast had already been gathering information on interfacebus.com so I went ahead and signed up for the free service. They must have gathered the data from people that use the service, or purchased the information from other servers. But they did indicate that data on my site was an estimate of some total, because they don't really have complete access to the site visitors.

To gain full access I'm required to place a small piece of Java code on each of my pages that they can read [just like Google]. Well I'm not inclined to do that to 1,400 pages just yet, but I did add the code to my home page. Having the home page tracked will at least improve the data they have about the site. I should see improvement in their tracking data in a few days when they update my statistics, they call it ~ Quantification in Progress. I can always add the code to the top ten pages of the site to provide even more data. The attached graphic is what they show now ~ a small segment of the charts and tables of data.

Quantcast indicates; "... Quantcast helps web publishers of all sizes understand the composition of their audiences and attract higher advertising rates ..."

Webmaster Tools

I uploaded yet another sitemap to the server last night, than let Google [webmaster tools] know. Google indicates that 1445 URLs were submitted via the sitemap. About 15 new pages.....

The point of up-loading a site-map is to let Google and other search engines know that there are new pages to be indexed.

The new pages were really just larger pages that were reduced in size by breaking the page into two smaller pages. The hope is that the smaller pages will help reduce the number of keywords on a page so ads will better target the page. However, the reverse is that the smaller pages will have less key words so they may not show up high on the search engine list. That's the trade off between a large and small page ~ better ads, worse search engine ranking.

Not sure which is better, but if the 'reduced' pages were never showing up on page 1 of a search engine any way than smaller pages are better.... interfacebus.com
Graphic is Visits from Japan.

Visits increasing

This is the same graphic I posted a few days ago, updated. Visits for the week are all above 8,000 to the web site. The increase is coming to late in the month to help, but this should turn around the slide in hits over the last 4 months.

Current visits are at 94,558 for the month, 129,612 total visits, or 1,849,578 Hits... Year to date Unique Visits: 1,193,224

Bandwidth: 10 to 12GB per month.

Referrals

I just blogged about this the other week, again last night I checked, 21,000 page impressions with zero to no income.

I run Referral ads from a number of companies, 21,000 ad impressions and a larger number of clicks but they generate no income. Well so much for free advertising, I deleted them from four or five pages last night. At first I was adding them to the larger pages, as a banner or page filler, not any more. They will be deleted as I run across them.

Somebody must make money from running these Referral ads? The number above is from one company, taking into account the others and the ad impressions reach into the 100,000's.

The graphic shows visits/hits per day for September. The numbers are down a 100 or so a day. Any day lower than 8,000 is a bad day ~ most are below 8000, so it's a bad month..

Video Interfaces

Just how many different types of video interfaces are there, and which ones should reside on my gear? Of course there's VGA, or really SVGA, which still gets supplied with most monitors and computers. However I oped for DVI on the last video card I purchased.

HDMI came out last year and it's competitor DisplayPort came out this year. Of course there are others, but most interfaces are out-dated ~ as well as all the analog interfaces.

The pic is just another map showing visits by city from China....

Page Impressions

Hits to the web site are down a few hundred a day. It's not uncommon for visits to rise or fall 10,000 a month. From looking at the graph, hits are down for months now, and that's not good.

Of course fewer site visits means fewer page impressions. The chart shows page impression from Jan. 2006. As pages are optimized people will hit the new page rather than hit some other page on the site and click over to the correct page. So, as the site gets more and more topic specific I expect to see fewer page views, but I also would like to see more people hitting the web site. More visits translates into more page impressions, unfortunately I'm not seeing that.

There's a 3 month lag between a site up-date and when Google picks up the change.....

Once the graph drops to all black ~ that's the week ends. The dip in the middle of the chart ~ server went down.

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.