Norton Anti-Virus Review

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

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

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

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

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

AWSTATS

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

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

The chart shows data collected from AWSTATS.

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

Server Bandwidth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Site Visits

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

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

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

Serial Bus Page

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

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

Domain Registration

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit; US Military government, a B1 bomber.

Domain Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESD Details

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

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

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

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

External Links per Page

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

ATCA Chassis Manufacturers

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

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

Site Up-date Rate

Web Page Update rate:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quantcast data

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

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

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

Quantcast Site Tracking

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

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

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

Webmaster Tools

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

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

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

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

Visits increasing

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

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

Bandwidth: 10 to 12GB per month.

Referrals

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

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

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

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

Video Interfaces

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

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

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

Page Impressions

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

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

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

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

Robot Visits

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

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

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

Low page hits

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

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

Why Blog

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


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

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

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