Decrease in Visits

This month interfacebus received the lowest visits for the year, with about 121,000 unique visitors. Just a little less then June of last year, but higher than June/July of 2006.

So visits are still flat over the last three years. Anything before 2006 is much lower than the last three years.

The web site serialphy is also stable over the last few months, but with only a few hundred hits a month. Serialphy is up over the first four months of the year.

[Text Removed 6-28-2010]

A new site was started over the last few weeks on Google Sites and is also called interfacebus, but with a different root address. This sites now has 12 total pages. A counter was just added yesterday so there is no data on site visits ~ other than a few showing today. A second site was also started, but only holds the sitemaps for the three other web sites; interfacebussitemap.

Google Sites is free......

Google Sites

I've generated about 17 pages out on Google Sites, most are copies from my "old" Google Page Creator site. I have taken a few pages off line, but most pages are still up on the old site, with a note pointing to the new Google Sites page 'interfacebus'.

I just added the tracking code from Google Analytics, so now the pages have a counter. By Monday I should see some data, assuming anyone has found those pages yet.

I also added the code to generate a Google Sitemap for the site. Not really sure why Google has you generate a Site-map, shouldn't they know about web pages that reside on their own site?

I still have a lot of gif files out on Page Creator that I really need to move

Web Pages Updates and Graphics

Following last weeks running of Xenu to check for 'bad' links, many of the re-directed links have been up-dated. Remember, links that are re-directed are not broken...

During this same time graphic files from my Google Page Creator site are being moved to a new storage location. To reduce server bandwidth many picture files are stored out on Google Page Creator, and not on the interfacebus server. But, Google is closing that 'beta' program so a new storage location needs to be found. Errors can occur while up-dating the html code as the pic file addresses are up-dated. Xenu will need to be run ounce again to find any of these new errors.

The Google Page Creator site also held html pages which need to be relocated. Google has a new html generation program called Google Sites. Today I added nine new pages to Google Sites, which are copies of the old Google Page Creator program. All of the new pages added today really just hold a graphic, like the previous site, but the graphic was deleted from Page Creator in favor of a link to the new page.

I'm still not happy that instead of fixing Google Page Creator, they decided to close the sites. I started my site in 2006, that's 2 years of generating a 'page rank' and other people finding my pages and linking to me. This mentality of keeping all services as beta, for years, is BS. My pages were 'in addition' to my main site, supporting the site ~ what about those people that started an on-line bussiness using Page Creator?

Here is the new address for the new site interfacebus, hit the sitemap link on the left menu bar to see all the pages. Again, these pages only hold a graphic, and their new. No pages link to them and there are no page to page links, other than the sitemap. Any page on the main site 'interfacebus.com' will still be linking to the older site.

I've also completed a few Knols in the last few weeks, but I'm not sure how to indicate how to find them. Google seems to be .... what? I don't get it. Search "knol" on Google, then search "RS232" ~ you will then find that knol, with links to the other knols; hint [RS-232].

There are many redirects

Was it just yesterday when I indicated I didn't need to run Xenu? What was I thinking with that comment? That program just found a number of link re-directs that indicate a company (website) has been taken over by another company. I don't worry and seldom correct redirects from links that move from 'what.com' to 'what.com/eng' companies do that crap all the time. But, the ones I noted seemed to move from one company to another companies web site ~ I guess times are hard all over.

The report contains a number of sections, and 're-directs' is just one of those reports. I fixed the 'bad' ones and saved the others. I did not review the "bad links" section; because, mostly that just means the site is down. I did find three sites that were redirected to the server which is not good. When a site redirects to the server that is running ads it means the site is history ~ those links were removed.

Many of these sites were already linked from my site as 'rel=no follow', which means I was telling the search engines not to follow the links, or the link is not really there (to the computer) so my site does not get pinged.

I'll never understand why some companies re-direct so often, it's like they don't get the book-mark button. One company e-mailed me a few years ago; you must change the link on this page to 'what-ever.com' [it's important]; ok; but, by the way your linked on a dozen other pages as this, and this, and this company ~ ! There is one company that always stands out over the last few years, well really two companies that always have bad links ~ I just delete them now. Why link to some one if you can't find what your looking for, or you get a 404 [page not found code].

Our incoming visits are reduced, so let's change our address so people can no longer find us. What? Yea we don't need all the sites that link to use, our page rank or any incoming links from other pages, the 'bad link we'll make us better......


Who runs these sites or their web masters? Somebody just does not get it.

Time to spider the site again

This week end I'll run the Xenu spider again to check for bad links. Some time after that I'll run the GsiteCrawler to generate an xml site map to upload to Google web-master tools [after I fix any issues found by the Xenu crawler]. I never run a crawler during normal office hours, as they put a strain on the server. Both Crawlers have to check each page on the server; or 1523 active pages and 209 inactive pages.

I've updated 1,440 pages since the Xenu program was run, but most have been html up-dates [a few gif files may be included in that count]. However; I've hand checked most pages over that time so I should not find that many issues. I was running the spider program once a month, but it seemed to miss a few issues so I've been hand checking links. The last check by the program indicated 5,978 links

Twenty new pages were added to the site since 6/7/08, so it's about time for a Google site map via GsiteCrawler. There may be a few page-to-page link updates that have been made as well, but not many ~ should make a more up to date site-map regardless.

Most of the page up-dates are due to one or more of these issues [most updated at the same time / page]:

Java script code change for Google Analytics [page visit counter]
Java script code change for Google Ads
Removal of all Java Script code for Google Referral Ads [program terminated]
Removal of two different meta tags [html coding issues, redundant un-required code]
Re-direct gif links as Google pages go out of service [Google web site terminated]
Java script code change for the Google Search Bar [ Code up-date, but not required]
Non-US ['dot'com] pages getting the html rel 'no follow' code [html non visible change]

The attached pic is of a Georgia map indicating 188 visits from that country so far this year. Russia just invaded them.....

edison software program review

I down loaded and installed edison from Verdiem tonight based on an article I saw. What a waste of time that was, and now they have my e-mail address.

The program was to make my computer go green by giving me more control over how it operated when I wasn't using it, when it should go to sleep and so on. I was going to make a smaller carbon foot-print and help the environment ~ or not.

I clicked on the schedule tab to set my time when I use the computer, it indicates the 'non-work time' is already set for you ~ how the hell does the program know that? The 'work time' is adjustable but fixed for the days you select, so you can select 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. My computer usage is 5am to 7am M-F and 6pm to 8pm M-F, but you can't select two different time frames. Plus, Saturdays and Sundays are also different, but again the time frame is fixed regardless of the day.

How is this different than just having the OS put the computer in sleep mode? edison is a joke, plus I have yet one more program running in my task bar consuming my expensive memory.

I do not recommend using edison by Verdiem because I just don't see how it benifits a user. Yes it tells you your kWh usage or saving or what ever, but so what. The program is taking up $50 of my RAM to do the same thing that Windows Vista already does. Yes it "seems" to calculate a savings if I set it to turn my PC off while I'm still using it, but that's not why I purchased a $2000 computer.

I only opened it, noticed the lack of options and closed the program two minutes later. I did not detect any options that made it appear any different than the options with the MS OS, and I plan to remove it once I submit this posting. Any e-mails to my gmail account will be flagged as spam.

Google Page Creater

It appears that Goggle is dumping their original free web pages call Google Page Creator. I don't know if it was much of a surprise. The program lacked any real tools and sort of appeared as a toy compared to what Microsoft was offering [Live Spaces]. So, the message I saw indicated that some time this year the site would close and all web pages would be moved over to their new site called Google Sites. Yea, I don't think much of their new site either.

So for the last two years I've had a few dozen web pages located out on Google Page Creator. That's two years of web history that will be lost when they decide to close down that program. Two years of gaining external web links and of course a page rank. Now any new page I start on 'Sites' begins with a page rank of zero, and no other external sites linking in.

Worse still, I was storing about 50 picture files out there that interfacebus was using with in that site. I must have that number of pages on interfacebus that linked to those pic files [to save bandwidth] that have to be updated. Which one of my pages used those pic files? Which pages linked to the html files out there?

The new site is here, but its just a blank page or so, as I'm still trying to figure out how to use 'Sites. I hate it already, but I need an external site....

Web Page Usage

Last October I posted some data on the number of pages for each of the web sites I run. So 9 months later I figured I would recount and post the new data, which follows below. I don't track the information, but new graphic files are also always being added.

Notes on the Chart.
Unique Visits = Total different people per month
Visits = Total number of people including retuning visits, on a per month basis.
Pages = Number of pages viewed, normally 2 or 3 times the number of visits.
Bandwidth = server bandwidth, relative only to its self.
Click on the graphic for a larger view.

Page Data.
1519 web pages, interfacebus.com
0093 web pages, serialphy.com
0389 blog pages, interfacebus.blogspot.com [this blog]
0098 blog pages, serial-interface-buses.blogspot.com [Blog; new pages additions to interfacebus.com]
0025 blog pages, interfacebus.spaces.live.com [Blog, early version of "what's new"]
0012 web pages, Google Base [Holds a few articles, and pic files]
0002 web pages, Google Knol [Holds articles]
0075 web pages, interfacebus.com [Orphan pages, no longer used]
0116 web pages, interfacebus.com [wrong address pages to capture mis-spelled words]
2382 total pages residing on the internet

That's an increase of 554 web pages over the last nine months. Now keep in mind that some of these pages really don't bring in any traffic. The 166 pages that capture a mis-spelled web address really only work for a few months, as the link shows at the top of some forum. As the post with the mis-spelled address falls off the front page, less people will find it.

But the Blogs really contain more pages than shown. Blogs archive once a week, or month, or year. So every month the Blog automatically generates a new page for all pages in that month. Each year a Blog will auto generate 13 new pages; one per month, and one per year.

On the other hand, many pages have been enhanced or upgraded over the last year. It's not just about the number of pages, but how well those pages address your topic. Most new pages that get added are small and contain little data for the first few months because I know the search engine needs time to even find the new listing. So I up-load the new web address, add what data I have and get back to it when possible, knowing that I don't want to miss the search engine spider.

Chart Data
Unique visits are down over the last few months, but we my be in a recession? Visits, of course, track unique visits to some degree so the decline is expected. Again, page views track site visits, so page views should decline at least two times as fast as page views. A site visitor will not view 2 or three web pages if they never visit a site.

Google's Knol interface

I signed up for Knol from Google today. I had heard about it a few months ago, but at that time it was closed to most users. Knol is open to the general population now, and I signed up for it.

I assume Knol is Google's answer to Wikipedia, which is good but some what odd. Many search terms on Google return a listing from Wiki as the first listing on the results page. So why not come up with their own free social content collaboration 'encyclopedia' web portal. Of course the Wikipedia site gets a lot of bad press, so it could be that by next year the Knol site will see the same press, but it may depend on how they post those pages on their results page.

Any way I posted two articles today. Both need some help, but I posted them to get them out there. There should not be many people finding the pages at these stage, so it should not be a worry.

I posted one Knol on the Secure Digital card [flash memory] and one Knol on the declining RS-232 interface [re-posted from this blog]. However, neither posting shows up in a search yet? I did just see a link to verify my name, so I went ahead and did that, I got a call 10 seconds after hitting the submit button.

The attach picture depicts web visits to interfacebus from the Nerthlands so far this year.

Cuil Search Engine

I tried out the new search engine that was released today. A few ex-employees from Google came up with cuil, which seems to still need a little work.

Like we need another search engine any way. The attached graphic is a partial list of visits from robots and spiders for the month of July. Note the server bandwidth the search robots take up. Odd that the Cuil robot did not show up in the list this month.

www.interfacebus.com does show up in the list, but does that mean that the last time the site was spidered was a month ago? And a search for interfacebus only produces a link on the 6th page.

I saw a number of compliants about their search results, and I agree with all of them.
1. The site was off-line or did not respond.
2. The graphics shown with the results do not relate to the listing
--- My site came in with a GM logo, I don't display anyones Trade Marked Logo.
3. Duplicate site listing on the same page, multi-page links from the same site
--- Like the old Yahoo search results, with page after page of the same site in the results.
4. Results returned link farms, like key word stuffing working again.

Annual US Wind Power Capacity

Here is a chart showing Annual Wind Capacity for the US [United States], note the large increase in the last few years. So what is T. Boone Pickens [blog link] talking about, there seems to be a lot of wind power activity.

Related; Wind Power Capacity per state map. Hmm somebody just made a comment that this is only 1%, I'm sure he's right ~ but still a large increase in using wind power. The numbers are going up, and that's what counts

Wind Resources in the US

The attached map of the United States shows the available wind resources in the US. The map colors indicate the amount of wind power available, with blue indicating the highest wind speeds. The color red indicates the next highest wind speed, followed by purple, pink, and orange. Map credit; US Department of Energy.

Compare this map with the one that shows Wind Power Capacity. The two maps seem to track, as the states with the highest wind speed also have the most wind generation plants.

Googlebot Crawl Stats

Here is the latest graph showing Googlebot activity in the last 90 days crawling interfacebus.com. It appear that the web site was off-line back in April and the spider stopped coming by for a few days. At most the site was off-line for less than a half day.

The same page that provides this data also shows a bar chart of pages with page rank 'PR'. There are four columns; High, Medium, Low, and Not yet assigned. I can't really tell if I have any pages ranked as high (above PR 5), as I can only see a sliver of color. Medium (PR 5) may contain a few pages, at least the index page. Most pages show as low (below PR5). What I don't see is any pages listed as 'not yet assigned', which has always showed many pages in the past. So Google has ranked all or most of the new pages that have been added to the web site ~ and that tells me I have stopped adding pages at the same rate I had been.

Link checking and SEO stuff

Hmm, I've been hand checking some pages and have found some bad links on the web site. Maybe I rely to much on Xenu to check the links on the site.

I see some old re-directs that have been fixed, just to clear the redundant listings. But what I'm more concerned about are the dozen pages found that point to the isp, indicating that the web site is gone. I assume that the Xenu robot does not detect those changes ...... That's not good. Still a few bad links out of 5,000 isn't that bad.

Open Source Office Applications

To my surprise I found a few free office type applications today (web based). Server side applications are fine, assuming we don't lose the internet connection. This link provides a listing of office tools, both local and server side.

Here are the addresses to these new application;
http://www.spresent.com/
http://product.thinkfree.com/
http://www.zoho.com/

The 'zoho' seems to show the most promise, I'll down-load or sign in now....... I'm in!

Is there a Browser War?

It looks like it just may be a matter of time before the war is over or comes to a draw. The data from the web site indicates that Firefox only inches ahead and only in sub-percentages. Seems a small increase in Firefox usage.

After a 1,000,000 visits Firefox still gets the same 28% of users. What is that a few thousand new users over the last few months? I started a new poll, left of screen for Browser usage.....

Btw I use both IE and Firefox, so my usage is 50/50. Both Browsers are set up to open multi-windows on start-up. The previous topic was "The Browser Battle Update", from 4/9/08.

Page Rank & Listing of Manufacturers

One of the sections of the site is a listing of Manufacturers in alphabetic order, instead of by topic. The alphabetic listing of Manufacturers spans 94 pages. The section received 1,255 pageviews in the last 30 days, and 8,205 page views this year. The alphabetic index page, which also happens to be letter 'A' receives most of the hits, and the rest are spread over the alphabet.

The section help people find companies when they might not be sure of the name, and it indicates who may have purchased the company if it changed hands. It's a lot of work keeping all the links active and valid, but it does seem to serve a purpose.

Any way, several months ago I broke up many of the pages to make them smaller, reducing the number of links per page. The new pages started with a zero page rank, which is normal, but they still have not recovered. Worse still, I checked one page today and the content didn't even show up during a search ~ meaning the page was not even indexed by Google.

Pages with a zero page rank:
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Amd'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Asq'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Be'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Bl'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Br'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Cm'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Con'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Cp'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Dem'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ec'. html code updated,links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'El'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Em'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Fm'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'G'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Gen'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Gl'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Go'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Hb'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Hj'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Il'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'In'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Int'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Intel'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Jd'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ke'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ki'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'L'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Mo'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Nik'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Oo'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'P'. html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Po'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ram'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ren'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sen'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sig'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sk'. html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sp'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Tb'. html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Th'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Us'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'V'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ve'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Vi'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Vm'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Wi'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Z'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..

Wow, 47 pages with a Google page Rank issue ~ that's not good. But what is the problem with the pages?

I did notice that the entire section declares xhtml 'strict' coding, so I updated a few to 'transitional' coding today. The pages will validate declaring 'transitional' coding, but that can't be the issue or they would all have a zero page rank.

Any non '.com' web site link has a "rel = nofollow" in the link so even if the link were bad Goggle would ignore it. The 'rel=no follow' must be on 20% of the links, making them save regardless.

I'm running Xenu tonight to check the site for bad links, but that program will not indicate if some other site has taken over an address ~ so I'll have to hand check each link to insure the page opens to the site listed. Xenu reports 8 bad links (0.13%), with 5937 good url's.

I hand checked a few pages, see the text above, but I don't see any issues. I don't mind so much about losing the page rank, but I would like to have the data searchable. I could be missing a number of visitors because the page are in Google's supplemental listing.

New Sitemap Up-loaded

Using the GsiteCrawler program two separate XML site maps were generated, one for interfacebus.com and one for serialphy.com. Google reports 109 urls (pages) uploaded for serialphy and 1673 urls for interfacebus.

Looks like more than 50 new pages have been added over the last 3 months, sense the last sitemap generation. However the site's HTML site map was updated as new pages were added.

Google Analytics reports 985,815 visits, with 1,880,906 page views. Both of those numbers are down from the same time last year, by 15,000 visits (it was off-line yesterday).....

GsiteCrawler is free like half a dozen other programs that generate xml sitemaps.

Digital Video Connector Identification

I got an email a few hours ago from some one trying to identify a connector on the back of a PC card. The video connector appeared to be DVI connector, but had 35 pins instead of 29 pins.

For the first few minutes I was wondering what the connector was, but after a few clicks on the web site I replied to the e-mail with an answer. I found two other connector styles with the correct amount of pins, and that looked just like a DVI plug:
Enhanced Video Connector, EVC.
Plug and Display, P & D. released in 1996

I think both these interfaces are dated, but many obsolete interfaces are still in production, ISA cards for example. Any way there are newer video interfaces out there to replace even the DVI bus; HDMI, and UDI to name two.

USB 3.0 Specification

Looks like the new USB standard is due out soon. Other than the transfer rate (4.8 Gbit/s, 600 MB/s) and some data about the new connectors I have not found any other data on the specification yet.

USB 3.0 products are not due out until at least 2009, so you still have awhile.

Update; so there are a few products starting to be introduced now, as of 9/09. Of course my PC will not take advantage of of 3.0 USB device and I don't have any planes on getting a new PC this year either.

So;
Description of USB 2.0.
Description of USB 3.0.

Web Page Code Optimizing and SEO stuff

No new page addresses in the last few days, so I'm enhancing some of the existing pages.

Google came out with some enhanced script for their Analytics software, so I've been updating that code on the web pages. The code is a tad larger than their old code but it does more (I think). Google Analytics is used to track site visitors and provides a lot of data.

While updating that code, I also update the java script code that displaces the ads on each page. The new java scrip is only half as big as the previous code. So I save several hundreds of bytes per page with each new up-load [first post on topic; Page Optimization].

SEO Up-dates:
Images ~ I've also added several new graphic files in the last few days, mostly on the new pages, and this is why; Hits from Image Referrals.
Links ~ I'm up-dating the link text for page to page links (the underlined blue text), to insure that it's descriptive. Don't link to a new page with 'more info', use a descriptive link.
Bounce Rate ~ Trying to decrease the bounce rate as a page gets updated. When the page has a high Bounce Rate [click away to another web site], I spend the extra time to insure all possible page to page links are there, and keeping people on the site.
Back-Links ~ Increase the external links that point to the main Engineering web site [this links counts]. Note that the links associates the term 'Engineering' and 'web' to interfacebus.com. There are two ways to go here; always associate a single term with your site/page, or associate the page with a different term each time [with in a topic].
Meta-Tags ~ Back in 12/14/07 Google Sitemaps indicated that 208 pages on the site had Meta Tags that were considered short [need more descriptive text]. The current report only indicates 70 pages with a short meta description. It may be less than that, because you can't determine the date of the report or which pages were last checked.

Promote your site on the DMOZ data Base

I requested that serialphy be included into the DMOZ Directory [Open Directory Project]. Years ago it was really important to be listed in DMOZ, which is what Google built its directory from. These days it hard to even find a link to the Google directory, it's all about just using the search bar now.

But because the DMOZ directory is free to down load, any one can build there own web directory. Which means that your site listing could end up in a number of different search directories. So, I still recommend getting your site listed in the Open Directory. Not really sure how much directory are used any longer.....

interfacebus.com has been listed in DMOZ for years now, and serialphy should be large enough to be included, but I won't know for a number of weeks.

Promote your site via News Groups

How can I promote my web site:
Using the usenet newsgroups is a good way to promote your website. There are thousands of different types of newsgroups that cover just about any topic you could think of. So there will be many different groups you could contribute to, and get the word out about your web site.

There are a number of ways to read and write to the news groups. You could down load any number of newsgroup readers off the web; I use XNEWS. You could interact via your web browser using Google Groups, which I also use. Or you could access the news groups via Outlook Express which normally comes free on a new computer.

If you end up using Google Groups you will find additional discussion groups not found in usenet. Or, XNEWS will display usenet groups, while Google Groups will display usenet and groups hosted by Google. Starting your own group, under all most any topic, is easy using Google Sites.

So how do you promote your site; find a group and write a post. If you can't think of any thing to post, just sit back and answer some one's posting leaving your site name as your signature [the last line in your reply.

I've posted 447 messages since 2005, leaving the interfacebus site as my signature in a few cases and this blog address as my 'sig' in almost all cases. Most people will appreciate your reply, but not visit your site. Of the small percentage of people that do check out your site some may result in an even smaller segment that returns, but thats what you want.

Check Google Groups for "interfacebus.com" and you will find that the search returns 1,200 pages ~ that's not me. That number is from other people posting a link to my site, that's the power of promotion.

The down side to posting in either usenet and to a smaller extent Google Groups is that replies to your post my be completely negative [Flame]. A lot of people 'live' in these newsgroups and jump from group to group flaming posters. I get 'flamed' once a month or so for a posting, but I only track a posting for about a month.
Todays Flame;
Original post: Why does my site not have a ranking?
My Reply: Duplicate content, check for ...... ~ (he did not leave a url, which is common)
2nd person: How can you know that..
3rd person: Lets rename this spam.
4th person: No place for overt advertising (left to me because of my sig.)
-- I just answered this guys question, and I get all these replies to my post and not the guy looking for help.

In usenet you can block these bozo's so you never see the reply after the first one, but you can't with Google. How ever, using Google you can read all their previous posting. Very quickly you find (in most cases) that their replies carry no meaning.

Read this post from Nov. 2007 and you find me posting my site address [I do not recommend you doing this]. The first reply is a flamer, but three other readers come in to denounce the flame posting. Note the flame guy never responded, as he went off to anther group. ~

Web Page Bounce Rate

Should you care what your site's Bounce Rate is?

Bounce Rate is a figure that describes a visitors preference to leave your site or push into another page within the site. The Home page of interfacebus has a bounce rate of 33%, or 33% of the people that find that page click away [2008 figure]. However; a visitor may click onto another site run by interfacebus.com as shown in the attached graphic. For example the lower part of the graphic shows 5 bars that indicate the percentage of people that click on those links [which happen to be hidden under the bars].

The first bar presents people viewing the FAQ page, which happens to be local to the site [0%]. The sitemap used by interfacebus, indicated by the next bar, is located off site and would constitute a bounce [but 0% of visitors viewed it]. The next bar represents this blog, not a local page [5.1%]. The next bar is the blog representing new pages added to the web site [5.1%]. The final bar is a resume but is local.

In addition to those three possible external pages, a person may also use the search bar. The page returned from a search is external to this web site and would also be a bounce, even if they click on another local page returned by the search [5.1%].

So the index page has a 33% bounce rate, but 15% of people just go to another page hosted by this site resulting in an over bounce rate of 15%.

Now the overall bounce rate for the web site is 70% [all pages combined]. Is that bad, I doubt it, seems people find the right page they're looking for on the first search or hit to the site. However going over each page would just be to time consuming.

Are we really running out of oil

The short answer is yes, the US is running out of oil. Note the graph on proven oil reserves, and the its decline. We now have just as much oil that we had in the 1940, with just a few more cars on the highway. The spike around 1970 must be Prudhoe bay, but I did not verify that. Oil production at Prudhoe Bay has been declining since 1989 [peak oil]

Oil consumption increases 2% a year, so to break even you need to find at least 2% more oil each year. The graph indicates the reverse as proven oil reserves are decreasing as we consume it faster than we discover it. The previous post showed a chart of US production which is different that proven reserves [oil in the ground].

Related posts; Why we import oil, Peak oil, Why gas costs so much.

Why we Import Oil

The US imports oil because we consume more oil than we can produce. The graphic shows US oil production from 1920 to 2008. Peak oil in the US was reached in 1973. Peak oil is the point of maximum oil production.

These days we produce the same amount of oil we were producing in 1946, regardless of how many wells we have in operation. The numbers are thousand barrels

Data source eia.doe.gov.



Other Posts on topic: Why gas costs so much, Peak oil and the end of gas,

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.