Visits from Sub-Continent Regions

I'm still wondering why visits over the week end came in at normal numbers. Both Saturday and Sunday numbers were right on the mark at 8,900 visits. The attached chart shows those two day numbers.
Friday visits were down by about 2,000, and Thursday was down another 3,000, so why isn't the weekend missing any visitors?

I checked the prior weekend and the numbers appear almost identical to the one shown in the graph. Outside of the US, India sent in 610 visits, the United Kingdom sent 479, and Canada sent in 446 to name the top three countries.
Graphic; Google Analytics, Map Overlay, Sub Continent Region, Visits.

Holidays and Technical Websites

The site interfacebus always takes a hit on holidays, who goes out to look up electronics stuff on their day off.
The chart is web visits so far this year, on a weekly basis. Over the last three months there's been slow but growing increase in sites visitors over last year. The last data point, for the week ending yesterday showed a 21% increase over last year. The week before that had a 16% increase in site visits.

The decrease in visits last week, for both years, was due to the holiday. Saturday received a normal 4500 visits, which is a bit strange. But Thursday was down 33% and Friday was only down about 1400 visits. The site will exceed last years November numbers, but its still iffy if it will exceed last months numbers.
2,039,975 visits so far
3,718,243 page views so far.

Pageviews still on the Increase

With the up-coming holiday I assumed that interfacebus would start seeing a decrease in site visits. However that has yet to occur, at least that I can tell. Yesterday was the second highest Tuesday on record, with 9,221 visits. Of course I'll see a decrease the day of the holiday, but because the web is world wide the decrease won't be total. In the early hours eastern Europe will be showing up, followed by South America and Canada, and then Western Europe ~ or something like that. As the chart shows the site just past 2 million visits to date for the year.

All the bad links were fixed from the site-wide check the other day, nothing but routine updates occurring now. There is a slow html enhancement being made to the Dictionary and Acronyms pages, but that will go on for weeks. In a few cases the page might visibly change but not by much.

I did notice that the main Transistor Derating page lost its page rank, not really sure what happened there. A few of those pages were also just updated [2N3441], but they still get almost no incoming visits. Guess everyone already knows how to derate a transistor, or I pick transistors nobody uses.

Graphic; Google Analytics / Map Overview / Countries/Territories 2009.

Proprietary Embedded Board Formats

I just happened to be checking a few of the COTS Board Manufacturer pages today. I noticed that the few pages I picked to update, at random, were receiving almost no incoming visits. It only took a few minutes before I realized that the three board formats I had updated were all proprietary standards. Really proprietary board formats, because I don't know that any board standard was ever released ~ other than a detailed data sheet so the board could be designed into an embedded system.

So I opened the STX Board Format page to do a routine update, or just to check to see it was up-to-date. Anyway I also opened site analytics to see how the page was doing for visits. That  board format receives almost no visitors, then I started to wonder why that was. That's when I noticed that the format was proprietary in nature.

There really is no reason for someone to visit my site for a board format that is only produced by one or two individual companies, unless they don't realize the standard is proprietary. So I can understand why the incoming visits to that page are so low. However; on the positive side, by listing the standard on the site the information is there to review if it ever comes up in conversation. That is, I don't have to claim ignorance, within minutes I know what the STX board is just by pulling up the page.

I figured I would then check a few other proprietary board standards, like E2Brain. Same story with this industrial format, except that this page received even lower page views by 30%. I pulled up the PISA board standard next. Now to my surprise the PISA format was getting 3x the page views even though I figured this format was obsolete. The PISA slot format is based on a modified PCAT slot connector, which by definition implies obsolesce because the industry moved onto PCI many years ago.

I don't have a point here, other then to indicate that some pages will never do well on the web, but they still deserve a place on interfacebus to insure the topic is covered; Industrial Embedded Board Formats.
I did make sure that the page clearly indicated that the board formats were proprietary......

Graphic; Single Board Computer [SBC]. Public Domain.

Google Page Ranking

Not really sure how many other times I've posted about Page Ranking issues, but I'm always amazed when I come across one of my pages with a zero page ranking. Now sometimes a page does regain a page rank, I just rechecked two links from the Aug posting.
However in other cases the ranking remains at zero. From the April posting, which only related to the section on Equipment Manufacturers;  the 'Ae' Electronic Vendors listing remains at zero months later, and I'll bet it had been there long before that. Also nothing for the 'Asq' Electronic Vendors, the 'B' Equipment Vendors, 'Cm' Equipment Manufacturers, 'Dem' Manufacturers, and the 'Fm' Component Manufacturers page. I'm sure there are many others in this section with no ranking. Note [below] that the blog posting in 6/08 was basically the same posting as 4/09.

Another section that always has a lot of no-ranked pages is the Recommendations for Derating a Transistor. For example the 2N3250 Derating Guide, the 2N4150 Derating Guide, or the 2N6691 Derating Guide all are at zero and they have been on the web for over a year.

Yet another section that always has issues with ranking are the Technical Terms section. Just to list a few; 'Tr' Definitions, the 'Rec' Terms, and 'Op' Technical Terms. There are many other pages as well, these are but a few. But as the web master I have no control over how a page gets ranked.

So I updated these pages again as they required it, but there is little else I can do. The equipment manufacturers have existed for over three years, the engineering dictionary for over two years and the Derating guidelines for over a year.......

Previous Blog posting;
No Google Page Ranking. Aug 19 2009
Zero Google Page Ranl for Component Vendors. Apr 22 2009
Page Rank & Listing of Manufacturers. June 8 2008

The graphic is the site logo for interfacebus.

Xenu Report, Statistics for Managers

I ran Xenu on interfacebus over the last hour. I run it on the off hours to keep my server happy, or at times when I expect low site visits. Normally I check for bad links every three months or so, but it eats up server bandwidth so not more than that. Plus the error rate is only 0.6% and most of those will turn up good later today.

Forbidden Request;
This just means when my spider hit the site, they return a no robots message. But I checked them and they all work. 
The resource is no longer available;
Yahoo Geocities closed down this year and I had one link off the Engineering Dictionaries page. I removed the link and reloaded the page.
Timeout;
Their server is slow; 3 out of the 5 sites are working now.
Temporarily  Overloaded;
Another slow server; three of the 4 sites are working.
Server Error;
I don't know what this means, two of the 3 sites are working.
No Object Data;
That's from Kaparel. First guess is he no longer exists...

The rest will not be rechecked today. After years of doing this I've learned not to wast my time checking and re-checking the same site. I'll give them a few days to come back on the web. However three of the 'Not Found' issues is from one of my pages which will be fixed today. It does appear that one of the 'Not Found' links on the VHDL Counter page is gone, if he doesn't come back in a few hours it will be deleted.

So of the 65 issues, 25 are good. Leaving 45 potentially bad sites out of 6885 doesn't sound so bad. Remember, most or all of those sites could pop back up later today as their server comes back online.
The other side of that is many of these companies reside on more than one page; for example a vendor might be listed with Battery Manufacturers, but also on the OEM vendor listing. Or maybe a company manufacturers SSTL ICs and LVTTL parts.....

Anyway the site appears healthy; also, the highest number of visits for a M, T, W, or R occurred this month. Not sure why Friday is lagging and I'm not really tracking the week ends.
Graphic; Xenu report summary. Click for a larger image.

Google Analytics Recomended

I've been using Google Analytics since mid 2006 on a daily basis and I recommend the program 100%. Google Analytics tracks traffic statistics for interfacebus. I like the software not only because it tracks my site stats, or because the software is free, but because of the different reports Analytics provides. Many of the screen shots used in these blog postings are right out of a Google Analytics report.

So Analytics has a new report [beta] called Intelligence which provides 'Alerts', the green bars. These alerts which would open below that graphic once one of the bars are clicked. Looks like the number of alerts vary by day and they may also be either positive or negative. For example on Nov. 5:
Time on Site; people spent 88% more time on the USB Interface page then normal...
Pageviews; the number of page views for the AWG page were 15% below average.....
Visits; The number of visitors from Canada down 19% and California 11% below average.
For each of these data points there's an expected range so you don't get an alert because page views varied by a few hits.

This data was always there, but never on one page or in the same report. Not sure what to do if hits from California fall, seems like that is out of my control.
I recommend using Google Analytics..
Graphic; Google Analytics, Daily Alerts, November. Click for a larger image.

What Constitutes Good Content

Not much going on with the web site, a lot of page updates and three new pages. Normally when a page gets updated it's just a minor change. Maybe a paragraph but more often it might just be defining an acronym.

Any how the site is still doing well. Yesterday was the best Monday ever for sites visits, and it had 30 more visits than last Monday which happened to be the previous best Monday ever.... The best Tuesday ever was just two weeks ago.

So the question is why are the hits increasing and how do I know which pages to work on. Analytics feeds me a ton of data but many times it's hard to know what to do with the data. Sometimes I'll update a page based on a low number of visits, but maybe a page receives no visits because their is no interest in the topic. Maybe the page content is to small to bring in any visitors, Who can say ?

I'm looking at three pages relating to HTML coding; one page had 64 hits, one had 167 hits and one had 4,000 hits this year. For the year, each of the pages did better this year than last; however there was a 22% drop during October. In any case the site has only had six different weeks this year that did not out perform last year. The current data over the last several weeks indicate this year the site is receiving about 15% more visitors over last year. Yet again, another data point only shows a 0.34% increase in page views for the entire year [+12,000 pageviews].
Graphic; Google Analytics. Blue is this year.

Web Statistics

The incoming numbers still look good for the web site this month. They seem to be about the same as they were for last month, so this month should almost be as high as last month, but the holiday will drop the total down several thousand visits.

The graph is for Page Views per year for the last 5 years. However there are two notes; first the first 3 months of 2005 had no data so the fourth month was used to back-fill the data. Second, 2009 does not include numbers for Nov or Dec of this year.

The peaks are hovering around 2,300,000 page views per year. The current data indicates this year will show around 2,500,000 page views. That's based on a current number of 2,061,643 page views, plus 223,689 from last month and 172,882 visits from last Dec.

Other than that, just normal web page house-keeping is getting done over the last few days. Oh I did notice that the AWG Table for Wire Gauge Size and Current Capacity showed two different 2,000 view dips lasting for three weeks each this year. Not really sure what happened to the AWG page, but it appears to be an issues with Google Analytics?

Chart; data from AWSTATS, produced by OpenOffice.

Feed Burner Stats

Seems Feedburner is doing ok, or at least its bringing in a few visitors to the blog. It would appear that the people who are visiting the blog are finding it via one of my animated headlines I placed on several of the web pages; however most of the clicks are coming in from Desktop email clients and desktop feed readers and I'm not sure if there is an animated headliner in the blog feed...

So far the headline animator for this blog has been viewed 1,488 times and clicked 18 times to bring new people into the blog. This blog has then sent 89 visitors over to interfacebus.com over the same time frame. Every little bit helps, I'm always looking to get new visitors to the site.

Highest Month for Visitors

So this month saw the highest amount of visitors to the web site. There were 160,384 unique visitors and a total of 219,826 visits. From those hits there were a total of 339,286 pages views [note these numbers don't include today]. Although it might be a bit hard to tell this month is higher than March at 159,517 but again, not counting today. Better yet, October is not normally a 'high' month. Click the pic for a larger image.


Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 100,000 [on the chart] but really equates to 10GB as the numbers were changed to fit the graph.

Unique Visits:
Are visits from a computer within a month, but any one computer is only counted one time. If any one computer returns for a second visit it's counted by the Visits curve.

Visits:
A site visit is registered each time a person visits the site within a month and each time the person returns to the site. Site Visits should always be equal to or greater than Unique Visits.

Page Views:
Are the number of pages a person views per month, regardless of how many times the visitor returns to the web site. Page Views should always be equal to or greater than Site Visits. Page views are really the only data point that is falling. Page Views is related to Bounce Rate, which is the percentage a person visits one page and then leaves the site.

I've changed the chart a bit for this month, now the legend and title are placed inside the graph. Placing the legend inside the graph allows the chart to grow in size while leaving the pic size about the same, although I did increase the overall size of the picture a bit.

The bottom trend line for bandwidth has no relationship to the other lines on the chart. The bandwidth line [light blue] does not show visitor data, but the amount of server bandwidth used during the month, while all the other data represent visits or page views. Basically the 100,000 'y' axis represents 10GB of server bandwidth and the 150,000 make would be 15G Bytes. So in this one case, I want these numbers to be low. The more they fall below the 'Unique visits' line [just above] the better it is for the site.

OpenOffice Suite

I downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice last night; the current version was 3.01 and now the new version is 3.1.1. I also noted that a newer version is due out in December and I saw a mention of the Ubuntu operating system and that it will also ship with a version of OpenOffice. Recall that I just requested a free Ubuntu CD which should be arriving in a month or so.

Some of the charts used in this blog are generated by OpenOffice; as in Web Visits and Seasonal Fluctuations.

BTW; OpenOffice is free and has been downloaded over 200,000 times a day and well over 3,000,000 times this year. I stopped using MS Office for home use a few years ago, I think I had the XP version.

Other free Office packages.
Graphic; B-2 Spirit bomber aircraft.

What is the Android Operating System

Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Android was started by Google, but it's open source now. Seems like it's primarily only on mobile phones right now but I bet that will change next year. Looks like there are a number of phones about to come out using or based on Android. Once the people making phones see a reduction of ~ $40 a phone because the OS is free, other mobile devices should start jumping on board. Why not, reduce your products cost by $40 or make another $40 in profit, plus it appears Windows mobile has a low user rating [or so I find on the internet].

Although the graph shows 2009 data, hits from Android started coming in last November, with 11 visits for the month. Visits have ramped up over the last year to 38 visits for last month [87% of which were new visitors], according to Google Analytics.

The server side counter [AWSTATS] does not report any hits from Android. However it might just be lumping Android visits under its "GNU Linux category [there are 7 other Linux based operating systems listed in the report].
Here are the different versions of Android coming in [2009]
Version 1.0 = 7%
Version 1.1 = 26%
Version 1.5 = 58%
Version 1.6 = 8%

Now it wasn't but a few years ago that search engines were telling web masters that they had to reformat their sites to allow them to work on mobile devices. Now, the un-formated sites seem to work just fine on those new devices, so I'm kind of glad I didn't spend three man years building another site just to find out later it wasn't needed.

Side topic; So far this month there are 138,782 unique visitors; higher than Jun, Jul and Aug.
By the end of the day there should be around 146,000 visitors, pushing it above Jan, Feb, Apr, and May.
Wednesday will pull in another 8,000 plus visitors. This month may bring in the highest amount of visitors this year.

Graph is produced from Google Analytics data.

AVG Anti Virus Scanner

I down loaded the newest version of AVG Anti-Virus software yesterday. I went from version 8.5 to version 9.0; both were free versions of the software.

The first thing I did was disable AVG LinkScanner. The LinkScanner routine pre-checks all the sites that come up in a search engine results page. A lot of web masters dislike AVG's LinkScanner because it sends unwanted traffic to their web sites. Each time a web address shows up in a search engine, AVG down loads the page and checks it for viruses. Well that could end up being a lot of bandwidth for a web site if they keep showing up in the SEP by some one using AVG. The routine brings in no traffic, but downloads the web page regardless.
People using the AVG linkScanner and people still running version 6 of MS Explorer are the biggest grips I've seen from web master's on-line

A few hours after the install, AVG wants me to reboot again so it can upgrade it self, I guess I can under stand that.

Although I have not yet run a scan, I set the program to do a slow scan. The default scan speed was 'automatic', with a higher setting called 'fast scan'. Maybe this will not slow down my computer so much...

Ok, I just started a virus scan, looks like it reset to 'automatic', but it doesn't matter the scan only took thirteen minutes, down from 50 minutes on the older version. That seems odd, I wouldn't have figured on that kind of increase in speed ~ but I wasn't using the PC.

I also just reduced MS Explorer web page disk space from 10MB to 7M Bytes, but I left the history at 7 days. That 7meg storage space still a lot of web pages. I didn't see how to do that in Google Chrome. I reduced Firefox to 7 days as well and I didn't see how to reduce the cache size either. Reducing the cache is just another way to speed up the virus scan, less files on the hard drive.

Review of AVG Anti-Virus Software, version 9.0: I recommend it [so far].
Graphic; B2 bomber taking out those viruses.

Incoming visitors from Forums

I was just checking Google Analytics data on Referring Sites, or sites that send visitors to interfacebus.com [not the home page]. I noticed that I get many more incoming visitors from on-line forums then I do News Groups. I always figured the News Groups sent in a lot of traffic because every other day someone posts a link to me in one of the threads. Now I realize that when I search Google News Groups, that they post forum links as well. News groups have been on the decline for a decade any way, once the web turned into what it is now.

The chart shows 34,262 visits from 529 different sources [forums]. The news groups only sent in 1,921 visitors during the same period. This year forum traffic accounted for 10,948 visits. Now none of that traffic is from me, I don't post in forums. But it is a nice way to get some free advertising, and they may end up coming back again because about 70% are new visitors to the site [really 80%]. Better yet those posting stay out there forever, so once someone links to me I still might get a hit years later.

Related Posts;
Referring Sites; 6/13/08
Referring Sites; 5/3/08
Why do I need backlinks; 3/14/08
Graphic; Referring Sites, filtered for "Forum", per week.

How to get a high Search Engine Postion

Search Engine Position [SEP] is the term used to describe where in a search engine listing a web address [web site] shows up. A good SEP would be ending up on the first page of results returned from a search. Of course showing up in position number one would be the best out-come.

A lot of web sites pay companies called SEO's [for Search Engine Optimization] to help the ranks or position in the search engines. But many times SEO's are employed by people that don't really under stand how search engines work, course their trying to run a business and might not have time to investigate the issue.

Well in most cases I think about those issues while generating a new page, and I try to account for many of the issues. However because page optimization [SEO tactics] doesn't help the viewer I don't always perform all the optimizations possible. As time goes on additional page optimizing is added, maybe the next time the page gets up-dated.

So any way I added a new page yesterday covering the Single Wire Debug Bus, and I linked to it from one of the Interface buses listing pages.  I also blogged about the new page in the new engineering pages blog.

I was out in Google searching for data on the Single Wire Debug Bus because I never really started writing the page yet. Guess what, using the search terms "Single Wire Debug" that new page I generated yesterday shows up on the first page of the results and is the 6th listing on the page [out off 136,000 pages]... That's pretty good.

Graphic; NASA rocket maximum payload comparison.

No Issues with the web Site

No really, but I took care of many of the updates I wanted to get done, plus I hit a ton of other pages.

If I had a free cartoon of a balloon boy I'd post it, but I don't.

I updated 50 pages today, 19 pages yesterday, 26 on Wednesday and 36 pages on Tuesday. Most were HTML updates which can not be seen by a visitor, but enhance the page regardless.

Hmm, so far this month I have 120,903 visitors, say 8,700 per working days and 4,300 on the week ends gets me to about 185,000 unique visitors. That would be about 30,000 above the next highest month.

Free Ubuntu Download or CD Shipment

I requested a 'free' CD for version 9.10 of Ubuntu today. I'm not sure why I had to sign in and register, but it was some what painless. Once you sign in with an e-mail address, you have to follow a link to continue the process. I guess the first set is confirming you gave a real address.

The web site indicates that it will take 6 to 10 weeks for the CD to arrive, shipping is free as well.

Last week I read an article about on-line banking which mentioned Ubuntu. Basically their point was that the safest way to access your on-line bank was to use a Ubuntu OS operating from a CD [from a fresh re-boot].
Now this week I see another on-line article relating to IBM and it's suite of programs with Ubuntu [or Red Hat].
So maybe it time to give this thing a try, I have plenty of hard drive space.......

This will be my first attempt using Linux-based Operating System [OS]. I first looked into about ten years ago as an alternative to Windows, but it seemed a bit difficult to install so I never bothered. Back then there was no install program for Linux, and you had to install dozens of files to load the OS up. These days the install process is just like installing any other application, just run the install program [I hope].

I'm over those days of caring what new colorful feature an OS has, I only use it to run this web site and that's it.
On power-up I have Windows Vista open MS IE, Google Opera, Firefox and an old HTML editing program called 1st Page. After that I may open an out-dated graphics editor [PhotoImpact] or Open Office if I need to modify a pic file or do some office related task. Other than that I don't care what OS I'm running because I'm never in it, as I'm changing my website with the HTML editor and verifying the changes with one of the browsers. Oh except for the graphic editor all the other programs mentioned are free.
Guess I'll comment again in about 10 weeks......

Ubuntu; A commercially sponsored Debian-derived Linux distribution that focuses on usability.

Graphic; Google Analytics Map Overlay, Sub Continent Regions, this year.

WebSite Server Issues

So the server that hosts interfacebus.com went down today for about an hour. It wouldn't be the first time the server went off line, but it seems like it has been awhile but then again I don't track it.

I was trying to use the website when it crashed, but I found something else to do, but what really gets me is the loss of hits or visits I'll see for today. You can't tell from the graph but when it went off-line at 10am which stopped incoming traffic during the highest performing hour of the day, and it was down for more than an hour.

Whatever, yesterday had 8,997 visitors which is just slightly less than last Tuesday with 9,042. From the chart, Wednesday normally pulls in the most visitors during week, so I was expecting today to exceed yesterdays numbers and pull in more than last week which was the best day of the year. Oh, click the graphic for a larger view.

So, I'll see what the numbers are sometime early tomorrow, but I'm already waiting for next weeks numbers?

Text from my server; We guarantee that all of our servers will exceed 99.9% Up-time.

Copyright Issues again

I was updating one of my pages a few days ago and I found a few entries that lack a bit of detail relating to the page they were on. So I was in the process of visiting those pages to get more detail regarding their listed products as they related to the topic I was updating, and of course checking to insure the company still produced that line of product. It's web site enhancement, site updates and quality control all with the same check; remember companies close product lines all the time..

I wasn't going to bring this up, but I don't really have any 'other' new issues to blog about.

So I'm checking out this companies web site, looking for data to enhance the listing I have for him on the page that's being up-dated. Of course we all know what's about to happen, right?
I come across a page containing data taken from my web site. Not good, but I had to read it a few times, I know it came from me but was a bit unsure how much of the data was lifted off my pages. It didn't take long after I pulled up the page the info came from, as the text was lifted verbatim, before I saw that much of a page was copied. Now I know how I write even if I don't remember what I write only because that section was written several years ago, but the give away was that although that page has been updated a number of times the section that was copied was historical, so I know it was never updated.

The companies web site only had a contact email for 'sales', while I assumed the web master garbed the data anyway, so I didn't even attempt to send an email. 

Well I deleted his contact info from my site, but not for the reasons you might think. Normally Google already knows the site has copied the text, cause they track that data. That site would never show up higher then me for any search relating to that same text . I removed his contact info because I linked to that company from twelve different pages on my site.
I was passing my page rank from my site to his, or reducing my own page rank, so his site would get a higher page rank. In Google's eyes, by linking to him, my site was voting for his site indicating I approved of his site. Well I don't approve of his site, and I'm not going to degrade my site, by passing away my page rank, while linking to him.

So his home page has a Google Page Rank of three [today], but he just lost twelve external page links that had page ranks of 3 and 4. It will take Google another month or more to spider the pages that just had those links removed, so it will be mid December before it stores my page updates and then January before the SEPs [Search Engine Pages] are updated. Remember, it doesn't matter if I sent him any visitors, I was telling Google I approve of his site...... Or it could be February before he sees a reduction in rankings.
Hmm, I have a label for copyright issues, must be occurring to much........

Graphic; Evolution of the Ares I Rocket [copyright free].