Page Impressions

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

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

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

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

Robot Visits

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

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

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

Low page hits

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

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

Why Blog

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


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

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

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

Added Some new pages

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

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

There are always pages that don't do well.

Interface Buses

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

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

Updated Visits Chart

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

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

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

TouchGraph Cloud

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

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

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

PCI-104 Form Factor

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

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

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

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

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

CableCard

I was out looking at Digital TV's on-line, up-dating the web sites listing for CableCard. This is a PCMCIA slot and PCMCIA card, a tuner card that can be inserted into a slot in the TV to replace a cable set-top box. Some TV descriptions indicate the term CableCard, while others indicate Digital Cable Ready [see below]. I was only able to find a few HDTV units from Hitachi which came with a CableCard slot. I see a few from Sony too. The CableCard allows the user to plug cable directly into a TV set without the need for a set-top box [STB]. CableCard slots may also be found on Digital Video Recorders [DVR]

Version 1 of CableCard was 'one-way' only so with out the cable decoder box things like 'pay-per-view' was unavailable. Version 2 released in June of this year should be fixing this problem [I have not yet reviewed it]. As of July 07 according to an FCC ruling; cable companies now have to supply set-top boxes that come with a removable CableCard. The ruling may bring CableCard back from the dead.

As far as PCs with a CableCard slot ~ forget it [for now]. CableCard interfaces are only available on Windows Vista machines and only with new OEM PC purchases. So you can't go to a store and purchase an up-grade to add CableCard, it has to be bundled with a new PC. Here's a quote;

"AMD's Digital Cable Tuner will only be available from PC manufacturers, and then only with a new Vista PC. There are no plans for support on Windows XP, nor are there any plans to sell the Digital Cable Tuner as a standalone product. "CableLabs has to know about every single system manufactured," ..... "They require full encryption and content protection, which means it's bound to Windows Media Center." HP has one: Digital Tuner-equipped m8010y.

Digital Cable Ready [DCR], this attribute describes a TV that incorporates a CableCARD slot to facilitate the reception of one-way digital cable content (which may include analog, digital, high-definition and/or premium programming) without the need for a set-top box. A CableCARD is typically provided for a nominal monthly fee by the cable provider. Sets may also use the term Digital Cable Turner.

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

Terms:

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

Link Exchange

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

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

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

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

Google supplemental index

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

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


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

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

Site Overlay

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

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

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

No Page Rank

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

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

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

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

SiteMap error

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

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

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

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

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

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

AWStats is off-line

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

I just submitted a trouble ticket.

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

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

Blog Feed Burner Stats

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

Hurricane Dean

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

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

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

Site visits from Florida

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


Total Visits: 64,096

Pages/Visit: 2.28

Average Time on Site: 7:20

Percent New Visits: 70.79%

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

Google Sitemap

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

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

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

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

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



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