Why does gas cost so much

You may be surprised but a barrel of oil cost about the same all around the world, within a few dollars. When the cost goes up in the US for a barrel of oil, it goes up the same amount all over the world and it has zero to do with a US company. World Crude Oil Prices.

Now the cost of gas at the pump varies widely around the world, and there are really only two main reasons for that, taxes and subsidies.

TAXES: Take the US as the base line and you find we pay 19% of the price of gas in taxes, but in Europe the tax on gas is around 70%. Remember both Europe and the US pay about the same for a barrel of oil, but at the pump the price difference is massive. And it doesn’t matter if the oil is pumped from the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico; cost at the well head is much lower than value in a barrel.

SUBSIDIES: Many oil producing Middle Eastern countries and other OPEC producing countries subsidize their oil. Even though the value of the oil is worth $100/barrel for example, oil rich countries sell their oil to their population at a much reduced rate ~ pennies on the dollar. There’s a very good reason why some countries can afford to reduce the cost of oil (or gas) to their populations.

The cost of oil is not set by the countries that produce the oil and it is not set by the US Oil companies (as much as you would like to think). The cost of a barrel of oil is set by three major international petroleum exchanges , [NYMEX, IPE, SIMEX]. So if it still cost $20 to produce a barrel of oil from the well, its then worth $100 [per NYMEX] once it gets placed into a 50 gallon barrel for sell. So if you happen to be a major oil producer and the oil companies are nationalized [run by the country], why not keep the cost down in your own country, as you still make 80% profit for any oil sold abroad.

The US did this as well back in the 80’s after the 1973 oil embargo, as they fixed the price that US drilled oil could sell for even as the world price was going up. Yes the Oil companies subsidized to cost of your oil for a decade.

Let’s review with some made up numbers;

The cost to drill oil in Texas is $20/barrel for example, $30 in the Alaska, $40 in the North Sea, or $10/barrel in Qatar. Numbers are fabricated to illustrate the cost of drilling in different environments. The value of oil is $100/barrel per SIMEX. So no matter the location of the drilled oil the petroleum company makes a good profit [for now]. The oil companies are not setting the price, and although OPEC did set the prices in the seventies they only set production rates now.

OPEC is divided into two camps, one camp would like the price kept high while the other would like a lower cost for oil [but neither set the price]. The countries that would like the higher price now need the revenue and have limited resources in the ground. The countries that want the price kept low have massive resources of oil and do not want the value of their oil in the ground to decrease. The US and other countries using E85 and switching to Hybrid cars would decimate the long term value of their oil reserves as consumption decreased over time.

One comment I heard the other day was that we could boycott a particular gas company and that would force the price of oil down. Unfortanitly that would only serve to put a few gas stations out of business. The oil companies could just sell their oil on the open market and run more imported oil through their refinery, so in the end the you boycott oil from Ecuador with out really knowing it.

Really want cheaper gas prices at the pump, stop driving and reduce consumption.

Web Page Strength & Importance

I came across backlinkwatch.com while searching the web. This site gives you all the links pointing to your site [back links]. Of course Google will do that as well, but this site provides two other pieces of data. First, the site indicates if the incoming link has an attached 'rel=nofollow' tag to the link, indicating that no page rank is passed with the link. Second the site shows the total number out going links on the page that contains your link. The more links on a page means that a smaller percentage of Page Rank [PR] is passed in each outbound link. The site found 5,158 backlinks for interfacebus.com. From the Back-link report I found tagurls.com which ... hmm, not really sure what it's telling me. But I found seomoz.org which gives an indication of page strength [SEO site]. interfacebus has a page strength of 6/10 per their report. Than cloudalicio.us was found which shows the number of tags [links?] occur over time on del.icio.us. Also checked out Technorati, guess they track blog activity.

Then I found this one http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/reqs_bestpractices/laws_regs/copyright.shtml.

Hmm, while interfacebus.com was rated 6 of 10.

Referring Sites

Like the posting from March 14 about Backlinks, here is another view. Referring sites bring a lot of traffic to interfacebus. The graphic is Referring sites by month, averaging over 10,000 visits per month [13,174 visits last month]. So every month the site gets an automatic 10,000 visits generating 20,000 page views per month.

Guess the previous post was more geared to incoming back-links from my own sites, while this shows all websites.

The bounce rate, or chance a person only visits one page is 68.04%. The average bounce rate seems ok, as the links are coming in to a specific page. The percentage of new visitors is 79.69%, meaning all those links keep bringing in new people, or people that have never used the site before. When New vs. Returning visitors is charted I find 24,000 returning visitors @ 4/1/06, and up to 49,000 @ 4/30/08. But because the site is always growing New visitors are also increasing from 100,000 to about 160,000 over the same time period.

Go Green, Save Gas, Increase Your Car's MPG

Want to reduce your weekly Gas bill; slow down.

I saw an old 2006 report from Consumer Reports that indicated a Toyota got 5mpg [miles per gallion] better at 65mph [miles per hour] than at 75mph, and another 5mpg better when travailing at 55mph. Or, change your maximum speed from 75mph to 55mph and go 10 more miles on a gallon of gas [$3.80 for my car].

My vehicle runs about 19.9 miles per gallon, nominal combined city highway. This week I figured I would put those numbers to the test. I reduced my maximum speed to 75 mph highway, consistently via the cruise control. I won't say how fast I was going previously, but I was never passed. Anyway, travailing back and fourth to work this week; 22 miles highway / 8 miles city, I only saw the gas consumption number grow to 20.4 mpg. Half a mile per gallon isn't any good, my time is more important than that.

Than I realized that my computer was averaging the mpg over the last computer reset point, 3 hundred miles ago. I reset the cars computer and drove home using RT 1 instead of US95. The highway had some construction which pushed me to RT1. The maximum speed on US1 was 50mph, I kept it under 60, but there were street lights too.

I ended the trip home with a 25mpg reading. Less than what was reported by Consumer Reports, but the several lights on the trip hurt me.. Over the next several days I'll keep the speed at or under 75mph and stay on the highway. But remember I started at 19.9mpg, less than 17mpg if I punch it.

I drive a supercharged V8 Ford Mustang with a Roush supercharger, the chip was changed out and it requires premium gas to provide over 400 hp [horse power]. One trip home is not much of an experiment, so I'll go back to I95 and stay under 75mph over the next week. I'll post the changes in miles/gallon as I put more miles on the car and computer. Check to see if any comments were added to this posting [those are the updates]. Save money and slow down on the highway.....

Aerodynamic drag increases with the square of speed; The faster you go, the more energy it takes to sustain that speed [mpg]

Military Robots

Ever notice the growing number of robotic systems that are coming out of the military. There appears to be a 2001 law pushing the number of un-manned systems. Guess that's why DARPA was running that unmanned vehicle contest every year.

Many of the robotic systems seem redundant, but I guess most are low production run test beds. The flying robots seem to be the most numerous being developed.
The military even has a road-map on development; it's a large pdf file [the link no longer works]. A number of systems are all ready deployed, with hundreds of robots operating in the field. Wow, flight hours for Unmanned Aerial Systems was 160,000 hours in 2006.

Most of the systems appear to be unarmed, so far....

Peak Oil and the end of Gas

Figured I would post something other than web site stats for a change.

The Peak Oil theory has been around for decades and relates to how oil fields produce oil. Basically an oil field's production follows a bell curve. There's a ramp up period, followed by maximum oil production [peak oil], then a gradual decline in production. The term Peak Oil is used to describe an individual oil field, an output from a country, or the entire planet's production.

The US reached peak oil in the seventies, and oil production has been slowly declining, and yes, that includes the North slope and Gulf oil fields. However the US still produces a great deal of oil, but we also consume three times that amount. And yes we still find new oil fields, but when you read the data you find that we consume more than we find [net oil in the ground is decreasing].

So anyway, the debate over the last decade has been when will the world hit peak oil. What year will global oil production flatten out or start to decline. The other tick is that usage increases 2% per year, so how could usage increase at the same time production stalls. Most countries have already reached their own peak oil, so production is falling in almost evey oil producing country. I think world production has been flat for three years now.

Of course there are those people that would say we could just discover some great new field that would save us. Sure, but it will be 400 miles of some coast in 4 miles of ocean and cost 100 billion to produce. All the cheap oil has already been found, others would say. The cost is never going to come down, in the long run. Some would say we will never run out of oil, which will be fine because oil is used for a great many products. But as long as cars run on gas......

So what, well a number of people have predicted that peak oil will occur between 2005 and 2010. Like I said, I think world production has been flat the last few years so I'd guess I shoot for 2006. Regardless of what the price of a barrel oil goes to, consumption will exceed production...

I see 500,000 hybrids have been sold to date; however, many large hybrids don't really save that much gas. err, they are only several mpg better than a normal car. The normal size hybrid cars do a lot better and get twice the mileage ~ up to 50mpg. The full hybrids, or battery cars are not slated to be released until 2010. The cars running almost completely off batteries get well over 100mpg.

I think the only thing that will slow the coming of peak oil is the cost. Now that gas is $3.50 people will drive less and consume less oil, so demand does not increase, or reduces [same thing happened in the 80's].

The web sites relating to peak oil have jumped over the last few years, as more people discover the issue. If your driving a large gas guzzler start thinking about dumping it before it's value drops to $0. I really want to predict gas lines in 2009, but with the price increasing consumption may drop off.

The graphic shows wind generated power for 2007 in the US. There's been a large increase over the last 5 years; but remember, power generation plants burn coal not oil ~ cars burn oil... Those states that have no wind production ... there are other maps that show wind speed, the states in white don't have 'much' wind.

There's a poll on the left side of the page to indicate when peak oil will be reached..

Web Site Optimization vs Bandwidth

I up-loaded the xml sitemap for interfacebus up to my site on Google Pages. The xml site map is used by search engines to determine the page addresses of all pages located on a web site. Search engines find your site map via a command within your robots.txt file. Up until now the robots.txt file indicated the site map was out on my server. The sitemap started on my server because Google Sitemaps does not give you the option of having the map in another location.

However, all other search engines find the sitemap via the robots text file. So Google will still check the site map, and hit my bandwidth, but now all the other search engines will go out to Google pages to access the sitemap.

The xml site map is 284k bytes in size and was viewed [down-loaded] 43 times last month. That's over 12 MBytes of server bandwidth. Yes I'm still trying to reduce bandwidth; currently running at 58.35kB/visit.

The html version of the sitemap [used by people] has been viewed 631 times this year. At the bottom of the sitemap is a list of the html pages located on 'Google Pages'; however the xml file will not be listed. The html viewable sitemap is also out on the Google server, saving server bandwidth..

The attached graphic shows the search trend for the term "miniPCI". I checked after my Analytics report indicated only three hits to the miniPCI page on the site [that's 3 hits for the year]. However it looks like I viewed data for a 404 page. The active MiniPCI pages has seen 3,377 page views. The page covering the MiniPCI 100-pin Signal Assignments page has received 333 page views, while the page covering the 124-pin MiniPCI card has received 3,497 page views.

Top Content and Page Views

So far this year [Jan 1 to Apr 17 2008] Google Analytics indicates that interfacebus.com has received 1,329,486 page views. Unique Pageviews would be 978,448 pages, still a very large number.

40,000 Page Views; 1 page address
30,000 to 39,999 Page Views; 2 pages20,000 to 29,999 Page Views; 4 pages10,000 to 19,999 Page Views; 9 pages1,000 to 9,999 Page Views; 247 pages100 to 999 Page Views; 636 pages1 to 99 Page Views; 582 pages
Many if not all the pages that received under 10 page views are 404 pages for misspelled or incorrect addresses. So that 582 number is looking more like 550. Also there are several dozen new pages, with 2 dozen added in the last few weeks that shouldn't bring in much traffic yet.

So there are 4 to 500 pages that only get about one visit a day. Remember that it's not all about page visits, some pages serve to round out the web site. Most pages must receive hundreds of page views a month, while many only receive tens of page views.

Seems like I blogged about this same issue a few months ago? Each time I find a page that has been on the web for years not getting any page views I do the same check ~ like this one....

This data has been up-dated on 6/23/09; see Page Content Issues.

Usage Statistics for interfacebus.com

Here is a partial stat from Webilizer, one of the three counters tracking interfacebus.com. It's about the same as any other stats page I've blogged about, except the Hits per Hour notation. 5,000 hits an hour? Or, 17,666 hits per hour, which accrued on the 2nd. That same day received 174,759 page requests. The odd thing is that the bandwidth or down load for that day was about the same as any other [total kBytes].

Bandwidth is still running about the same as last month; 57.87KB/Visit..

Search Bar Usage

The number of visitors using the Google search bar is increasing. I've been adding the search bar to all the web pages over the last five months [off and on]. There were many pages that never previously had a search bar.

The chart shows search usage by date [11/5/05 to today] for interfacebus.com.

The average is 279 searches per day, with 248,66 total searches.

Click on the graphic for a larger image.

This accounts for people using the Google search on the bar on the web site and on the left of this page, it searches interfacebus.com. If you need to search this blog use the search bar in the far upper left corner of blogger.

Currently the search bar defaults to search the web site and not the internet; however, there may be some search bars that default to the internet. I'm currently changing them so that they all default the website.

The Broswer Battle Update

Looks like Firefox is continuing to gain ground over Internet Explorer. The attached picture shows Firefox being used by 28.53% of the visitors to interfacebus.com. That's up from 23.89% over the same time frame last year. In fact IE is only accounting for 65.48% of the incoming hits, that's down from 70.44% last year.

The figures from March - Dec, 2006 show Firefox at 20.88% and IE at 72.33%. So IE usage has dropped 7%, while Firefox usage has increased 8%.

Java Support;
2006 = 96.47%
2007 = 98.15%
2008 = 98.25%

93.73% of the people are using the Windows OS so far this year.

Operating Fuses using AC or DC Voltages

I was reading one of the usenet groups the other day, and came across a posting I replied to. The poster was asking about available voltage ranges for fuses {AC voltages}, as he could not find the [absolute] correct voltage rating for a fuse. My reply was basically a quote right off the page for Manufacturers of Fuses.

"The voltage rating of the fuse does not indicate the operational voltage of the fuse. The voltage rating determines the maximum voltage that will not jump the gap between the elements after the fuse has already blown. So the fuse will operate at the rated voltage and any voltage below the rating. "

Someone replied back indicating that in fact I was not correct and that;

".. DC is a more severe condition. ... You should not use an AC rated fuse in a DC circuit. ..."

Followed by another poster who had this to say;

"The AC/DC differential tends to be glossed over a lot .... . One way this shows up as physical difference in AGC style fuses is that DC rated fuses are often ceramic rather than glass, presumably to contain the arc."

I took note of that reply and turned to the internet to research the issue. I came across a site that seem to indicate the same thing I was saying. In the mean time others replied as well. I posted the quote I found on the internet and also a quote from a US Military Standard.

"... once the fuse has opened, any voltage less than the voltage rating of the fuse will not be able to "jump" the gap of the fuse. Because of the way the voltage rating is used, it is a maximum rms voltage value. ..."

MIL-PRF-23419: Fuse selection: The following steps should apply in the selection of a fuse for any application: Step 1: Select a fuse with a voltage rating equal to or in excess of the circuit voltage.

Ya know, if it's good for the government. In fact the third section of MIL-PRF-23419 indicates this:

1.2.1.3 Voltage rating. The voltage rating is the maximum dc or ac root mean square (rms) voltage for which a fuse is designed (see 3.1). The voltage rating is identified by a numerical value followed by the letter "V".

In fact if one of the "/" documents are referenced you'll find that the maximum voltage rating provided does not indicate AC or DC values, just 125 V [MIL-PRF-23419/H].

It appears that the newsgroup thread has ended [at least until the week end], but I kept looking into the voltage issue. I came across data that I intend to add to a new page covering the Difference between AC & DC Fuses. Because of this blog entry, generating that new page, up-dating the sitemap, and adding a new page to the What's new Blog; the new page is just a copy of a per existing page with a new page address. I should get some data out there within 12 to 24 hours.

Caution; always check the IEC, NEC or any other standards body that regulates Fuses. Never rely on the web for information when it comes to personal safety.

Declining Page Views Trend

I posted a partial graph of this data back in November of last year, AWSTATS. That post provides the definition for the terms used, but I'll provide them again here..

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.
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.
Pages:
The number of "pages" logged.

This new chart shows an alarming trend, a major reduction in page views. However another counter shows no real change. New visits seem to be stable, as do returning visits. The server bandwidth appears to be dropping, as the trend line moves away the 'unique visits' line.

SEO and Hits from Image Referrals

When running your web site don't forget about what on-site images could do for your web page. The attached graphic shows the incoming visits to interfacebus.com from people using Google's image search.

The incoming hits are low, but they seem to be constant. Perhaps around 5 hits a-day in early 2006 to 20 a-day by the end of 2007. So not only text brings in site visitors, but an attached pic may also. Any way, incoming hits are good, and most graphics shown on interfacebus are located on another site to conserve server bandwidth.

The total visits due to image hits are 8,441 for the last two years. Yes, I know the site receives that amount of traffic in one day, but these are still new visits. I noted that the visits are increasing too. ~ Just to forget that people may also find your site via a posted image.....

Just another way to optimize your site for search engines, by letting them find your page with a posted image or graphic.

See also  SEO Tactics and Visits from Image Searches. 6/22/09
Chart; Image referrals per day.

New COTS Board Format

Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation [REDI]:

A new VME card format is out for release aimed at the new VPX and VXS VME card standards [EURO Card]. The new REDI standard adds much more than just a mechanical standard defined in the IEEE-1101 mechanical standard. The new REDI specification changes much from the old IEEE1101 spec and now tries to handle water cooled devices as well; in addition, to air cooled and conduction cooled boards.

What garbed my eye was the new card formats, really the same 3U/6U sizes, would now handle up to 500 watts. What? how big is my power supply now. The largest power supply I could purchase was 750 watts, now I have to provide 500 watts per slot. The only REDI backplane I've seen appears to be four slots or 2000 watts. How much does a 2000W power supply weigh, I assume it's a switching power supply.

Very few companies are producing VPX boards or VXS boards which are both still new card specifications. In addition, to date, both the VPX cards and VXS cards seems to comply with the older IEEE1101 standard and not the new VITA48 standard [which is yet to be released?].

Note: To make this blog post add a new web page, and add it to the sitemap I had to cut a corner. The two new pages that cover REDI or IEEE1101 listings are copies of another page, with additional notes ~ they are not ready to be released yet. But, no one should be able to find them other than from this blog listing. Also my main computer has begun malfunctioning, forcing me to my backup system.

I'll fix this post over the week end and expand to the posting via comments. The new pages will also be updated this week end, and will link the VPX description to the REDI page and the VME description to the IEEE1101 specification page.

Related links: Equipment Chassis Manufacturers.

Why do I need backlinks

Backlinks are incoming links to a web page either from a page that's part of the same site or an external page on someone else's web site. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks provide two benefits to a web page [site]. First, a backlink brings in visitors to your page. Second, a backlink provides pagerank [PR] to the page being linked to.

A page, that has a pagerank, will pass a portion of that pagerank to all the other pages it links to. A page with a page rank of 5 will pass 'x' amount PR to each page it points to. The more pages it points to the less pagerank is passed to each page. So the page that points to you passes you some amount of pagerank.

Server Analytics refer to backlinks as Traffic Sources, or Referring Sites. The server stats indicate that over the last month there have been 14,167 visits from 1,402 sources [backlink] to interfacebus.com. These are sites that link to me on their own, I stopped looking for referral sites years ago.

Last night I updated the search bar on 20 pages and in the process found a few bad links. I also added the tag rel="nofollow" to a few listings to preserve some of my own page rank. You do not pass page rank when you use the 'nofollow' tag.

I updated the sitemap again today reducing the number of redundant links. Remember that site map does not reside on "my" site, so they are all backlinks.

I added a new page to the site yesterday and made a comment in my what's new blog, providing a link to the new page [backlink].

I was in the newsgroups today, posted a reply to some ones comment. I left this blog address as my sig ~ that's a backlink.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Free Web Pages

I guess having a web page for free is great, but man these things are crap. They're just to hard to use, if you know what your doing ~ does that make any sense.

I signed up for MS Office Live [Not Recommended] back in 2006 primarily because they offered a free web page, space and a free address, for ever. I picked the site name [Address Removed], so I would lock in the *.net version of my site name. Microsoft registered the name during sign-up, and continues to make the payments each year so I hold the name. Yes, if you check WHOIS you will see that the site name is registered in my name, but I make no payments. They only offer a free address for the first year now. [UPDATE: Microsoft stop making payments in 2010, so I let the address expire.]

Any way my last update to that site was mid 2006 so I figured I add a few new links, correct some spelling issues and so on. I wish! The program would run-on all my links so they all pointed to the same page. It would append an 'http' to my link so when I copied the link from the browser I would end up with 'httphttp', which does not work.........

Guess that's why I stopped using the damn thing.

[Outdated text removed]

Free web pages at Google Sites; Engineering Data Site Map.

I've generated more pages local than I have using their system. I also use the web space to hold large graphics to off-load downloads from my server.
[Outdated text removed]

Web Site Usage

I compared January of 2008 with Jan. 2007 for Pageviews, Visits, and Pages-per-Visit. You can see the data in the chart to the left. Like any graphic here, click on it to in large the picture.

The chart basically shows that there is no real difference between this year and last. According to Google Analytics the site is short 3,000 visits and 30,000 page views ~ not a big difference.. Green is last year, Blue is this year.

I would have liked to see the Pageviews and Pages/Visit numbers to have increased over last year.
I was hoping that by adding the Google search bar to each of the pages, and having it search the site and not the internet the Pages/Visits would increase. However; it may be that the site is so optimized that a new visitor to the site [from a search engine] arrives on the exact page their looking for ~ reducing the page views.

New visits to the site are 78.93% this year vs. 77.96% last year, but these number are really about the same every month.

AWSTATS [Unique Visitors] indicates 153,351 for 2008, and only 148,633 for last year [Jan.].
The last two years have been flat and so far this year looks no different. {I've blogged about reason why ~ older PC buses that receive fewer and fewer hits a year}

New Site Uploaded

I spent the last few days fixing the site map that is generated from running Xenu. The generated site map starts with a great many redundant page listings, so I have to go in and remove a lot of them. The current page size for the sitemap is 505kB, while the one already on the web is 462kB.

I'll go ahead and upload the new map and up-date over the rest of the week. My system indicates 1143 html files [pages], as does Google. Google indicates I have 1444 indexed urls, and a total of 1606 total URLs. The difference is due to a number of orphan pages that capture misspelled page addresses.

Any way the 80 odd pages that were generated over the last few months are now part of the sitemap, and now have an external page link that points to them.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization [SEO] is the process of configuring or setting up your web site so that it is search engine friendly. It really accounts for much more than that by insuring that a web page ranks high in a search result via key word placement. "Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site." I practice SEO; I make sure the title or page address relates to the topic, insure the first paragraph describes the topic and so on.

Any way, I just ran the program Xenu to validate the links on the site. The robot found only four bad links, and a ton of redirects. I don't think many of these companies practice SEO. They seen to change web names, redirect to a new address for awhile and than go back to the old address.... I really don't get it. I don't even list a few companies any longer because I continue to see dead pages as they keep changing their page addresses...

I should be up-loading a new sitemap tomorrow once I get a chance to delete some of the redundant listings in the report. I also ran Gsitecrawler and generated an XML sitemap for the search engines, Google is still checking it.

On a side note, the web site seems to be going well. Download speed is being increased by deleting HTML comments, or breaking up large pages into smaller pages ~ and making the pages more focused on one particular topic. Adding a search bar to all the pages, so the site may be searched from any page. Changing the search bar so that it defaults to a website search and not the web [some pages had search bars that searched the web, while some defaulted to searching the site which could be a little confusing. I also continue to add more pages, better than 80 pages in the last four months. Google now indicates 1606 URLs submitted.

Site / Server bandwidth remains at 57kB/visits, but I think the savings from reducing the html comments is being off-set by adding the search bar to the hundred's of pages that did not have one.

Not really web site related, but I've been trading out the older google referral links in favor of their new referral code. The newest code selects one of a hundred ads, while their old code would only run google related products ~ Adwords, firefox and so on. Plus the html code is smaller in most cases as one referral link may replace three other older google referrals.

Jan 2008 was the best month ever in terms of visits, and from the site history this month should be even better. March is higher than Jan, while Feb is lower January. New content is always being added, and html coding mistakes are fixed as they are found. ~ All is well

Sitemap Correction

I just noticed that a version of my sitemap was out on my server, it's an older version. Or perhaps a version up-loaded by mistake and not up-loaded to my Google Page Creator site. I use Google page creator to serve a number of pages and graphics to off-load the bandwidth from my server. Any way here is the correct address for the SiteMap.

I site map is used to list all the pages on a particular web site, like a table of contents. Sitemaps are just another way to show available pages. If you run a web site you should have a sitemap for a number of reasons. The best reason to produce a site-map is that it brings all web pages to the same level. Pages may be four levels down from the index page on a web site, using a site map brings all pages up to the same level. A search engine reduces the importance of pages for each level under the index page. Also lower level pages may not be spidered as often as other pages.

So the wrong sitemap was being downloaded around 5 times a day. That's 15,000kB a day at 300k bytes in file size. I've been working on reducing the server bandwidth over the last 3 months, there are a number other posts relating to increasing down-load speed / lowering bandwidth. The current bandwidth is 57.74kB/visit, which is no reduction at all.

Fixing this issue may help to lower the size/visit numbers. With all obsolete addresses, the page was not deleted but replaced by a redirect page of 10kB which is much smaller than 300kB.

Never delete a page address if you can avoid it, you never really know who may be pointing or linking to it. Delete the page and lose a link ~ never a good thing.

Actually the page was viewed 278 times this year or 834,000,00 Bytes ~

USB Drive adds Permeate Memory to a Computer

I added one of my older USB thumb drives to my computer to add more memory to the computer system. Yes you can plug in a USB stick into a USB slot and tell the computer to add that memory to the system memory. The USB Thumb Drive is only a 512MB device, but it's a spare stick so why not increase the computer memory for free. The PC is a Velocity Micro with 2GB of DDR2 memory, via two 1GB memory modules. More about the current PC used to run the web site... Oh, I run MS VISTA.

When you plug in the USB stick a pop-up window will give you the option at adding into system memory, but may not. I tried this with a 1GB Geek Squad drive but did not see the option to add it into system memory. Once I looked at the drive I figured that because it seemed to be configured as a CD drive it would not let me. Remember many USB sticks are setup to read and lock the data so you can pull it out at any time. With USB system memory, you want it to read/write as fast as possible. So you may need to reformat the USB drive to see the option to add the drive into system memory.

So I should be able to add more data as a comment in a few days....

Web Page Updates

With the addition of the page covering Manufacturers of Thermal Chambers, I also added those 'few' companies to the appropriate OEM alphabetic listing. While adding those new links I also noted pages that contain an old google search bar or pages that could use a new referral link, or pages that still contain html comments [to save server bandwidth]. Pages that were up-dated in the
Alphabetic Manufacturers section;

Manufacturers 'Br',
Manufacturers 'Ea',
Manufacturers 'Ec',
Manufacturers 'El',
Manufacturers 'Emco',
Manufacturers Eon,
Manufacturers 'Tele',

Two additional companies were added to the PON IC's manufacturers page. A few words were added to the FTTH Description page, now linking to the Ethernet in the First Mile page. A number of Engineering Acronym pages were updated, this being but one example. Also all the IC Packaging pages were up-dated; The MEMS [MicroElectro-Mechanical Systems] had a new oscillator manufacturer added.

When required the pages received a new search bar, had hidden comments deleted, HTML code fixes and so on. Any how, other than posting what pages are changing this post serves a higher purpose, right. The posting serves to provide another external link to these pages which is always a good thing, perhaps insuring a page rank. It pings the search engine to check these pages as the engine reads these page....

The point is not to list all 25 pages that were updated today, but hit the highlights. Let viewers know what is going on and at the same time serve a dual function of working SEO issues ~ optimizing the pages for Search Engines, either on my web site or from this site.....

Oh, if you read this blog, Bandwidth is 60kB/visit, still growing after all my work to date?

CoffeeCup HTML Editor Review

Hmm, I'm trying the free version of the CoffeeCup HTML editor and I'm not sure I like it. The CoffeeCup Editor seems to be really slow ~ I don't like slow.

I was using the free version of 1st page 2000, and yes the program came out in 2000. You go with what works, or in my case what does the job and gets the job done fast. Any how I've gotten the blue screen about 4 times with my new computer, and each time it seemed like it was because of the 1st page html editor. Note, I said it appeared as if the html editor caused it..

Yes a newer version of the html code editor came out in 2006, but when you visit the site and read the forum you quickly find that 1st page 2006 is full of bugs and the site provides no support [not my words].

I'm not buying a new html program editor with out trying it out first, so I found CoffeeCup. This program looks a lot like the other program I was using, so that's good. Free is good, but the company does offer a paid version. Before I say what the issues are, I need to say that this is only the second day using the new program.

The program issues, or what I do not like about Coffeecup;
1: I can not move the last modified date [column] next to the file name [column]
2: The 'Name' column defaults to the CoffeeCup folder and does not remember "my" folder
3: The 'Name' column re-cycles to the start of folder any time I save a file, changing position
4: Any time I save a file, I get the hour glass ~ we're done.

Just for the record I only use an HTML editor to view text. The program displays commands or text in different colors, and or high-lights certain types of text. Other wise I could just use a text editor, as I use no advanced commands. Many times I will select some text and hit the 'bold' button, or 'center' button to correct the text view ~ so what, I could code that myself.

Here is the link to the PC I'm using;
http://serial-phy-interfaces.blogspot.com/

Checking Active Links

I just ran the robot spider to check all the links on my site. Things look pretty good, I had 5,985 links with only about a dozen bad links.

With a site like this one you always have to be sure the links are good and active. To many bad links and the search engines will penalize the site. So I deleted the bad links, and up-dated the pages as required.

Of course the site has hundreds of pages that do not have any external links at all ...

I did take the time to update a few pages, and I came across a few more pages that did not have a Google search bar:

Optical Transport Networks,
Gigabit Ethernet,
Ethernet in the First Mile.

All three pages are related to the Ethernet Bus. I also find that the Ethernet in the First Mile page has no page rank. Yet another page that has been out there for a year with no ranking. Granted it has no content, but give me a break here!

Any way, odds seem pretty good that no one finds a non-active link

No external Links

Other than my site map which is located out in Google page Creator, there are a number of internal pages with no external sites linking to them. I really see no difference between an external link or an internal link and I don't think the search engines care either, a link is a link.

However depending on a pages content, there are only so many pages that can cross link to similar content within my web site. So in that regard I am concerned about pages with few external links.

Here are some examples:
ATX Riser Cards.
Commercial Standard Communications Bus.
Intermediate Bus Architecture.
Interbus.
Microwire.
X-by-Wire.

There may be a few dozen other pages with only one link, but these are all bus related. Dealing with interface buses, which is what the site is geared to. I did note that many pages with few external links were new pages to the site. How ever the pages listed here are not new, they have been listed for months if not years.

The ATX Riser card only has one internal link as well.... So does the Apple RS232 bus.

Earnings from the Google Search Bar

Here is a chart showing the increase in earnings from people using the Google Search Bar. Although the search bar has always been on many pages, there were also a number of pages that have only received the search bar within the last few months.

The chart shows a 5x increase in earnings over the last several months. The bad news is that 5 times a low income is still a low income. I don't make that much from the search bar.

Previous posts provide charts showing the amount of traffic, or people using the search bar.

The new search bar I've been adding also defaults to search the web site, so that may help people stay on the site instead of being redirected to the web. Just today the search bar was added to eight pages that had not had search function before.

404 Document Not Found, HTML Code

Sometimes I'll see a number of 404 codes in my server stats and notice that there coming in from a particular forum or blog. Normally someone has just referenced my web site, but misspelled the page address, or just got the case wrong ~ I'm unix.

Any way when I see a large number of hits coming in to a page that does not exist, I'll generate a 'holding' page to redirect them to the correct address. Usually the surge in hits only lasts a few days until the link falls off the front page of the forum. But they keep coming as other addresses or if someone happens to find the link in a search. However I have not added one of those re-direct pages in a while, instead just relying on the 404 page to collect the visitor and hope they find their own way to the correct page.

The attached graphic shows page impression from Adsense. I generated my own unique 404 page back in Now. 2007, of course I placed ads on it. So the re-direct pages constantly get one or two page hits a-day, while the new 404 pages are now seeing 10 to 15 page views.

I use 'channels' in Adsense to break out different sections in the web site, in this case the channel is "bad page address". There are 126 pages in the 'bad address' channel, the 404 page, and 120 other misspelled web addresses...

Graph is date vs page impressions.

Search Bar Usage

Looks the more and more people are using the Google search bar. I still find pages that don't have the search bar, and it doesn't seem to be related to when the page was last up-dated. So even if I updated a page the middle of last year, I may not have added a search bar.

I last blogged about this just the 9th of last month, again I up-date the search bar if the page already has one.

Google supplemental index

Google hides what pages are in there supplemental index, but before they did I always had more than 100 pages in there supplemental index. It's really hard to find out which pages have been moved to the supplemental listing. A huge reduction in page rank is an indication, but loss of page reduction is evidence that a page has moved to the supplemental index.

Why, well any new page I make is a copy and paste of an existing page. If I don't up-date the Title, description, or page contents then the new page appears to be a copy of another page ~ no page rank ~ I check for duplicate content most time, but it depends on the up-date I'm making.

Web Pages Losing Page Rank

I'm still out checking some of these low producing pages. I've added comments to some of the previous posting, so you may need to click the title to see the added comment.

Any way I'm finding pages that were added to the site a year ago that are not showing a page rank. I know it could be a google issue, but I don't want to take that chance. A few examples of pages that appear to have lost their page rank [all from the How to Design an Equipment Chassis]:

Environmental Alarm Manufacturers,
Temperature Alarm Manufacturers,
Chassis/Card Slot Keying,

Why would the page rank revert back to a 'gray bar', err zero page rank?

Three Apple NuBus pages are also getting low page views, of course the bus has been obsolete for 10 years:
Update: 9-29-2011 the Nubus pages were all combined into one page.

Also XDR2 Memory Modules....

So once you get a page rank, you could lose it, but why?
The graphic shows that only 10 pages out of the 42 pages in the How to Design an Equipment Chassis get most of the traffic.

Tax Returns at no Cost

If you would like to get your taxes done at no cost and don't mind doing them your self on-line than the IRS has the answer for you.

Free tax preparation and electronic filing available for 97 million eligible taxpayers who earn $54,000 or less; Free File marks its sixth year. If your adjusted gross income [AGI] was $54,000 or less in 2007, you can use Free File to prepare and e-file your taxes online.

Free File will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through our network of partners, but it's important to remember that you must access Free File through the IRS website [irs.gov]. Get a faster refund, in as little as 10 days with Direct Deposit.

Free File applies to Federal taxes, while Fees for state tax returns may apply; however, some companies offer Free File state tax return preparation and e-filing.

Looks like there are 19 different e-file programs to chose from, including all the well known ones like H&R Block and TurboTax. It's just like using the paid version of the software, except it's free.

In 2006, the median annual household income according to the US Census Bureau was determined to be $48,201.00. The median income per household member (including all working and non-working members above the age of 14) in the year 2006 was $26,036.

Web Site Promotion

This post follows up on the Dec 29 2007 posting on "Blogger Page Views". That posting showed a graph of page impressions for this blog.

This new graph provides the same data but extends out to Feb 6 2008. The large increase in page impressions provides an indication of how site promotion helps in getting visitors. In this case the increase in visits is due to posting the blog name out in Google news groups ~ Answering someones question and leaving the blog address as a signature.

Yes those are 'one time' hits, but some small percentage of people may come back for another look

Bandwidth vs Low Page Views

Yesterdays blog showed some site stats concerning low page views or page impressions, several hundred pages receiving less than 100 page views a month. So I wanted to list a few examples of what pages were performing so poorly.

I have a section within the web site that provides an alphabetic listing of manufacturers. Years ago it started out as just four very large web pages, but over the last few years have been divided up into 88 individual pages. The main landing page is Electronic Manufacturers, letter 'A', with links to all the other letters. So, for this section of pages, that landing page receives the most 'hits', 372 page views [last month]. The page views drop for all the other pages, as a visitor clicks on the desired letter to find the manufacturers their looking for. The next best performing page is 'D', at 49 page views. In fact only 15 of 88 pages saw more than 20 page views, the other 73 pages receive less than 20 page impressions. The section may not see much action, but people do find it useful as it indicates who may have acquired a company that no longer resides on the web.

Anyway there is another post from Nov 3 'Server Bandwidth' that also mentioned that same section of pages. The manufacturers section uses a page format with 'to many' graphics and the previous bandwidth post pointed that out. The server "Webalizer" report indicates the top 30 files that are taking up the highest bandwidth. Back in Nov. one of the files was the graphic on the top of the page. Now that the graphic was ported over to Google page creator [and other changes over the last few months] the report is now showing 5 of the smaller graphics in the top 30 files. It's time to port those pic files over to my page creator account so they drop off that server and not my web site server.

Recommend Generating pages to provide content

I've always recommended generating more pages on a site to provide more and more content, generating more visits. But maybe you need more than just pages.

My server counter truncates its report on page views after a few hundred pages, so I'll use Google Analytics here, page view data for Jan 2008.
2 pages received over 10,000 page views.
96 pages received between 1,000 to 9,999 views.
455 pages received between 100 to 999 views.
455 pages received between 20 to 99 views.
398 pages received less than 20 pages views.

While my normal advice is to produce new pages to generate more traffic or page views. The data indicates that a person could generate hundreds of new pages and still see little or no traffic. Almost 4oo pages received less than 20 page impression a month, that's a lot of work for only a few views. Granted 398 x 20 is still over 7,000 views, but that's only 200 views a day.

Normal page views for the site runs over 14,000/day. Given that it takes better than 4 months to get page rankings, from the time the page is created, and only so many pages a month can be generated; it could be several months before a new site sees any traffic at all.

Any one trying to make money may be put off by this, considering that you can only expect a few percent of the visitors to view an ad. 7000 views x 2% x ad value = not much. So if your thinking of starting a web site, do it now to get that page ranking in 5 months. But don't expect to make any money the first year.

Those new pages that are generated in month 3 will still need 5 additional months for a page ranking ~ that's 8 months after the site was created.

~ Those pages with a low page view still help to round out my site. And at only 20 views a month don't even get viewed most days......

Always provide good Page Content

Yesterday I posted to the 'what's new blog' a few new pages that are still waiting for a page rank. Well I'm looking at the stats today for the web site. Many of those new pages are getting zero visits, or a very low number of hits. Several pages only have 8 to 12 page hits, which I assume is mostly from me checking the new up-loads.

So what's the deal then, does page rank really determine how well a page does. I'm reviewing the stats for one of the new pages dealing with microSD connectors. Just since mid Jan. that page has already received 110 page views, in just three weeks. That's 10 times the number of visits received by most other new pages and in a quarter of the time.

Hmm, looking at the Navigation Summary I see that 46% of the page hits are direct [via a search Engine] and 31% of the page hits are coming in from the microSD pin out page. Checking Google for the search term "MicroSD connector manufacturers" I find that page is listed first out of 24,000 other pages. Not bad for a page that is only 3 weeks old. The attached graphic gives the search history for the term 'microSD', there was no history for the other words.

So the other new pages do not provide the required content to place high in the search results. They have internal links that also don't receive a lot of traffic. The new pages are more than several pages off the index page [hidden deep within the site]. The topics the pages cover must have a low yield, low search terms.

Best Month ever

Last month [ Jan 2008] the web site received its highest number of Unique Visits ever, 153,351 visits. The previous high was in March of the last year at 149,184.

The graph starts in Jan 2004 and runs to Jan 2008, but there have been many other charts up-loaded that show years down to 1998. The current graphic only shows the last few years to better illustrate the fluctuations. Just for the record, if you followed the news, two under water cables were cut in the Mediterranean shutting down internet access to a dozen countries yesterday ~ maybe I lost a few hits...

January seems to always be an 'up' month, yes it has 31 days, but it also has new-years in there?

Visits appear to have increased 3 or 400 per day, into the high 8000's, with page views centered around 14,500 a-day.
Additional stats for the month:
IE = 66%, Firefox = 28%
Dialup = 4%
Windows = 94%
Java support = 98%

National Do Not Call Registry

I've made my first complaint to the FCC for a company calling my home phone. TruGreen called tonight at 8:15, saying they saw the condition of my lawn and left some papers in the front door. I tried to explain that they were not allowed to call me, but I got the standard response ~ I just work here, never heard of the 'Do Not Call list', but I will add you to our don't call list. That's fine, I said, and I'll add you to the FCC's list too.

It's the same response I've gotten for the previous two calls from two other companies. Well I guess three unwanted calls is my limit. One earlier caller indicated that she just dialed my number, after I told her she was not allowed to call. err, if she could dial my number than she is allowed to call me. I should have reported her too.

To sign up just go out to the National Do Not Call Registry web site and add your phone number and an e-mail address. It that easy to file a complaint as well. I think I'll make a point to just get the company name and number and up-load it to the FCC.

Web Site Sitemap

I took a few minutes to update the site map, located off the main page. It's been about a month since the last sitemap up-date. I only had time to add a few new links that have been added to the web-site over the last few months. I just kept finding a number of redundant link or page entires inside the sitemap that needed to be corrected / deleted. So I ended up deleting those redundant pages instead of adding new pages that now appear in the website.

So the site map is now a bit smaller in size because of the reduction of redundant links, but at the same time contains a few of the newer pages added to the site in the last few months.

Optimizing Page Code

Following yesterdays blog about reducing monthly bandwidth by 259M Bytes by implementing the new adsense code, I've added the new code to yet another 9 pages. These would be the next nine best performing pages after the first four or so listed yesterday. The pages include: PCIe, Wire Color Codes, IDE description, SATA description, PCI Bus, Voltage Thresholds, Interface Buses, and Firewire.

There was one other page that was updated based on how it was placing, but because it was an old page address I do not list it here.

Although these pages do get less pages views then the previous 4 that were updated, when combined they get many more. So I expect better than a 259M Byte reduction per month in bandwidth. The addition of the two up-dates should produce a reduction in server bandwidth of better than 600MB/ month. Normal Bandwidth per day is around 460 MB, so the monthly bandwidth was reduced by more than one day.

This is yesterdays blog page;
http://interfacebus.blogspot.com/2008/01/page-optimization.html

Page Optimization

I traded out the older Google Adsense code on the top four viewed pages of the web site with their new code. The new java ad code is about half the size it was before. The older code required 577 characters, while the newer code only requires 292 characters.

The top four pages are AWG sizes, Index page, CanBus, and the DVI bus. Looking back at some random month, their combined pages totaled 37,881 page views.

The difference in ad code is a reduction of 285 characters. Or 285 x 8 bits per character = 2,280 bytes. For one typical month that equates to a savings of 86,368,680 bytes; 2,280 bytes x 37,881 page views. An 86MB saving per month is pretty good for 5 minutes of work. It's a faster download and less of a strain on my server.

Wait a minute there are three ads per page, or a difference of 855 characters not 285.
So 3 x 86,368,680 = 259,106,040 bytes.... 259MBytes reduction in bandwidth.

General Page Up-dates

I think I've blogged about part of this before, but I'm in the middle of a general web site update. I can only track a few changes at a time with out lossing my copy/paste funtion and the up-date taking much longer.

So the three major changes that are going on from about Dec 15, is;

1. Changing the Google search bar so the search function defaults to search from interfacebus.com first. Also the new search page contains a banner for interfacebus that is view-able, while the older one was not. I noticed a few months ago that a buddy of mine did not realize he was searching the web or my page because the page was to busy. So it's better to start the search from interfacebus, and I display a banner.

2. Some pages have to many html comments. These comments are un-seen, but they effect the down-load so they are being deleted, maybe about 1/5 of the site pages. Again, the code comments are not displayed on the site, it's a down-load issue

3. I also up-date the copy right date, not that it matters

4. I don't touch pages that need a content up-date, I'll made those changes later ~ when I have content to add.

5. There was one other change I was making, but I'll stop making that upgrade. Within the manufacturing pages, I was moving the 'all links' index for a letter to a 'next page link' at the bottom of each page. Well I have three Complaints so far, that don't like that, I'll stop doing that

Google Search Bar Usage

The Google AnSense report for the last year is showing a pretty good increase in the number of people using the Google Search bar on interfacebus.com. Over the last few months I've been adding the search bar to more and more pages. I may have a few hundred pages to add the bar to, but I'm not really sure. The search bar must be on at least a 1,000 pages by now.

I can't post the revenue because I have not received payment for December yet. However the earnings have been increasing as well. Of course, I still have low earning days but the trend is increasing.

The added benefit; visitors to the site can perform a site search regardless of the landing page. In addition to adding the bar to new pages, I've also been changing the bar on existing pages so the search defaults to the site and not the web.

If you are an AdSense user I highly recommend adding the search bar for those very reasons: you make money and you assist your traffic find what they are searching for.

The amount of money I make via searches is [very] small compared to what the site generates from running ads ~ that chart includes searchs on this blog as well......

How to Promote a Web Site

So the numbers are in for 2007, unique visitors have increased by 100,000 from last year.
AWSTATS
Unique Visits = 1,651,854,
# of Visits = 2,354,985,
Page Views = 4,063,901

I guess any increase is good, kind of hoping for a bit more. Checking the what's new to the Site blog, I see 35 posts over the last few months. Most of those posts represent more than one new page address that was added. For example, this post listed 6 new pages. So come January or February these new pages will start to get a google page rank.

By moving some of the graphics off my main site and compressing html code I've been able to keep the server bandwidth constant between 2006 [136.57GBytes] and 2007 [140.44G Bytes]. However; I did receive more page views in 2006 @ 4,227,644.

One reason for an increase in bandwidth while having a decrease in page views: I've been adding the Google search bar to all the pages on the site. The search bar code contains 1927 characters, or 15,416 bytes.

Now I have to figure out why I have 200,000 fewer page views. I have had a lot of server issues this year. I have also been reducing physical page sizes, by moving information to new pages. So many pages have just one specific topic, so visitors may be hitting the exact information searched for on the first hit to the site.

Google Analytics Traffic Sources
Google Search Engine = 1,764,196
Wikipedia = 17,938
Direct Traffic = 131,634
Images.google = 5,361
My blog = 938
Stumbleupon = 742
mail.google = 443
Groups.google = 444

Related posts:
http://interfacebus.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-web-site.html
http://interfacebus.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-google-site-map-upload.html
http://interfacebus.blogspot.com/2007/12/web-site-status.html
http://interfacebus.blogspot.com/2007/11/awstata.html