What is wrong with Internet Explorer 8

What the heck is going on with MS Internet Explorer version 8.0.
Most times [but not all] when I right click on a link to either open in a new window or new tab, they open but the page never comes in. So I'm on a site which I want to remain open, right click the link to display in a new tab. Well the tab opens, but I just get the hour glass [for ever]. However the page opens immediately in the original window or by pasting the address into an already open tab, I can get the page to open in any other window.

So what is the deal with MS IE 8 about opening new tabs or windows?

I use three different browsers in two different displays to open up three different sets of web pages, so I still want to use IE even if I have problems with it.

I'm using IE version 8.0.6001.18813
Protected Mode; On
Photo credit; US Army, Stryker hit by a IED in Iraq.

Web Visits and Seasonal Fluctuations

Figured I would produce a different chart then I normally would. Just to show a different view point.

The number of visits coming in this week are some of the highest of the year, but not the highest because a day in March produced the most visitors [so far].

Any way it just doesn't seem like the incoming hits were matching prior trends, so I generated this graph to actually show the high and low trends by month. Yes I know the trend line is flat for the last three years, I'm working on it.

So the best month of the year is in March or sometimes January is a good month. The worst months are at the end of the year in December or mid year around June/July. It just seems odd that if this months hits continue at their present rate that October could be the month with the most visitors this year. Of course I only have a week of data this month, but I looked back over this year and did not find visits per day this high. In fact last month was the highest number of hits in September in the last three years..... There are already a number of older posts that indicate why the visits are flat, so just scroll down the page with the next page link being on the right side.

Data Source; AWSTATS off my server [apposed to Google Analytic data which I also post]. FYI; Google's count would be 3% low because that percentage of visitors do not run Java Script which their counter requires.

SEO Advice; I noticed a few months ago that Google was posting the last revision date of pages as they were displayed in their SEPs. So now regardless of the update I make to a page I rev the text that indicates when the last time the page was updated. In previous up-dates I would only change the date for a major reversion, certainly not for some html change that no one could even see.

ESD Orphan Pages

I was checking a subsection of the site for hits, and I find a page with just one hit or visit this month. I look a little deeper and I couldn't find a page linking to it. I'm sure there is a page linking in, but I couldn't find it. The tracking code is on every page so Analytics will track visitors regardless of any cross links. However; normally zero page visits indicate no possible way of finding the page [really it was one page visit].

The page covered Methods of Static Generation. Which means it just held a table showing the top five ways of generating static electricity and their resulting electrostatic voltage. Looks like that page was just a supplemental page just added to hold the graphic, because it had almost no text at all.

The pages covering ESD terms is a small subsection of the main Engineering Dictionary section, linked off the page covering Engineering Terms, Es. Here are the ESD pages listed by the first term on the page:

Antistatic Property Definition. A to D.
Electric Field Definition. El.
Electrostatic Voltages. El.
Electrostatic Discharge Definition. Es.
Human Body Model Definition. H.
MIL-HDBK-263. Mil Specs.
Static Awareness.
IC ESD Pin Protection.
ESD Wrist Strap. Looks like this has no incoming links.

Photo credit; United States Navy

The issues with ESD on board a metal ship must be reduced a bit......

Knol Reader Status

One more posting on the health of the family of web sites that make up interfacebus. This time I'm reviewing how Google Knol is doing. I only just added Google Analytics to Google Knol a few months ago so visitor data only goes back that far; otherwise I have no tracking data. The graph shows data on a per day basis, and appears some what low but there are only 10 knols out there.

There are about half as many pages on knol as the Google sites webpage, which gets about twice as many visitors. But I like Google Knol because it gives me a separate web site to post articles on. Example Knol; Description of Solid State Drives.

Google Knol only sends four or five referrals over to interfacebus.com on a daily basis.

Previous Postings;

Knol is just not working for me. 7/16/09
Traffic from Google Knol. 10/11/08

Feedburner Stats

So its been seven days now since I started Feedburner. The chart shows the data over the last week. The blue line represents Reach and the green line represents subscribers to the Feed. The numbers are not additive, but are a per day count. The number of Subscribers to the feeds are running around 10 per day. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.  Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

I've added a banner to a number of non-technical pages on the site, some of the faq pages. However the pages that had a banner added to them don't see a lot of visitors so it may be a few more weeks until more people see them. The banner that sees the most page views is the one on this blog.

Referrals from this blog are up 11% over 2007 and bring in around 700 visitors a year to the web site. The percentage of new visitors is 78% with a Bounce rate of 59%.

Free Blog Space & SEO Tactics

I went ahead and took a look at how these blogs are doing, following yesterdays posting about the health of the rest of the web sites. Looks like the visits are down a bit, but that's kind of understandable because I have not been posting that much over the last few months.  The graph combines visits from both blogs, click for a larger image. The large peak at the center of the date range is when I stated the other blog [New Page Additions to interfacebus]

Google Analytics indicate that the blogs send or refer around 250 people a month to interfacebus.com, I would assume most of those referrals are new visitors to the web site. The Bounce Rate or the rate that people only view one page after going to interfacebus.com is around 60%, and they stay for around 3 minutes.
The home page of the blog sends over the most visitors to the website, followed by people visiting the page relating to HDTV, SSTL Logic, and PCB Minimum Annular Ring Definition.

I'm not really sure what the news feeds I just started for the blogs will do to the blog visits. Either more people will see or find the feeds and visit the blogs, or people will just read the blog from the news feed and stop coming to the blog all together.

I still recommend running a blog, see 'why blog' below. In addition to the ten reasons listed in that posting it also gives me a chance to list web page address's here providing those pages with an external link.

Related posting's about blogging;

Start a blog to gain Site Visitors. 6/26/09
Blog Traffic. 5/15/08
Why Blog. 9/12/07
Blog Hits. 7/10/07

Web Site Health

I just spent some time looking over just how each of the web sites are doing, and they appear to be doing ok.

Yesterday I posted a graphic showing the increasing hits to the google sites location I run. There's  no doubt that the incoming hits are low, but they are on the increase and we're only talking about a dozen pages.

The analytic data for serialphy also shows a slight increase over the last year. However that site has triple the amount of pages but is only receiving a third amount of the visitors. I just updated a few of its pages with a bit more data.

Google analytics is also reporting an increase in visitors to the knols I've written, again there are only ten and only fifty people visited them yesterday. Five people were referred to interfacebus from knols yesterday.

The important site is interfacebus.com but the amount of visitors this year is flat at around 43,000 visitors a week +/- 5,000. The attached graphic indicates the analytic data for interfacebus, as complied from AWSTATS.

I didn't really check the data for the blog, but it appears to be flat as well. Interest in the blog feed is slowly increasing

Google Sites Advantage

The web site I run out on Google Sites seems to be doing better, at least for now [really sites.google].
Of course my site is called interfacebus, but it's under their domain string [sites.google/site/interfacebus]. But so what, it's free hosting, free website .... its free. The graphic is visits/week for Google Sites, click for a larger image.

Google sites replaced their old 'Google pages' which has closed down [mostly]. I ported the pages I had stored on the Google pages server over to Google Sites, and over the last several months added a few additional pages. The new page hosting plan is much better than the old one, however I did lose page ranking when I made the transfer. Right, the new site means new pages on the web, so page ranking takes awhile. However; the few pages I just checked do have a page rank from Google, but not the home page.

Sentence removed by editor. The first site map listed is pretty large so I'm glad it's taking up server bandwidth on some other server. Better yet hosting the site map on an external server means that I have an external site that points to every one of my pages ~ that's a good thing. Plus all the original pages they host for me also have a few links to different pages on my main site.

Now Google sites has only sent over 511 visitors to interfacebus.com over the last year which is really low. So interfacebus.com is not making any real money from that site. However; Google sites pages have received 9,389 page views over the same period, and because you can also run ads on their hosting service, I'm still making money [off that site], but I'd bet it wouldn't pay for lunch.

Page Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate
The Bounce Rate is still not improving on the web site, and I've been working to improve or reduce the bounce rate all year. From the Google help page the definition is; “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”. Or to say it another way, a visitor only sees one page out of the entire site and then chicks away to another website.

Now in some cases just hitting one page would be fine; say they found the site via a Google search for SCSI Cable Assemblies, and visited that particular page and clicked away. Well they found the vendor they were looking for and went out to read the online-paper. But at the same point I do expect some amount of people to check out more then one page per visit. Of course this is true, many hits result in multi-page visits. In fact some sub sections of the site always see visits that result in many page views per visit.

Now the down side of having a poor bounce rate is that it's a bit hard to correct. The only recourse I have is to add related links to a page with a high bounce rate and hope that one of those links are clicked. Some pages lend them selves to handle related page-to-page links while other pages do not, so it's hit or miss. Over the last nine months I've been trying to add related links to pages that had a high bounce rate.

Of course I could always start to write a multi-page articles and include a 'next page' link at the bottom of each page. Unfortunately much of the site is really not set up as a group of technical articles which span many pages.

Here is a sample of four pages that seem to have an increased Bounce Rate over this year.

Table of American Wire Gauge.
Description of the DVI interface.
Description of the Firewire Bus.
Cable insulation color coding.

Related blog posts;
SEO Tactics and Visits from Image Searches [6/22/09]
How to decrease Bounce Rate [2/13/09]

Photo; Maximum Thermal Impedance of a 2N5003.
Ref; How to Derate a 2N5003 Transistor.

Office Live and their Free Web Services

I finally logged back into my officelive account after 7 months of not checking it. I stopped logging in after Microsoft disallowed any other browser but MS Explorer from accessing the account. Of course I hadn't had any updates either, but I would have like to see the site stats regardless.

Any way Microsoft had said you would get a free web site, free hosting, and a free domain name. Now they indicate a policy change and they will no longer pay for the domain name; the interfacebus.net domain name expires April of next year.

The question is do I want this site, or is the site even making any money for interfacebus.com?
The web site really only has about a dozen pages


What I don't like about Officelive:
I can't run Google ads.
I can't login with out using MS Explorer.
The web tools aren't that great.

What I like about the web site:
It locks down the interfacebus.net domain name.
The site has a Page-Rank of 3
The site has sent 944 visitors to interfacebus.com [over 3 years]
---- Serialphy.com has only referred 247 in the last year.
---- google-pages [defunct] referred 2,597 visits over the last 3 years.
---- google sites has sent in 499 in just the last three months.
---- google knols has sent in 783 visitors in just a year and a half.
The site has been online for 3 years [06/06] and has history.
---- The incoming referred visitors view more pages and stay on the site longer
The site allows interfacebus to show up twice on a google search [cause it's a different site]

What is it just $10 a year anyway for a domain name, did I make that from those 900 visitors? It is free advertising [or was], but people posting about my web site in on-line forums sent in 37,127 visitors over the last 3 years! now that's free advertising......

The last related posting regarding interfacebus.net was 4/08 Usage Stats.

Web Site Status

Its be a month without blogging, so time to generate an input.

Web visits are up this month by several hundred, but I think it's just because its seasonal. Nominal hits are running around 8,700 visits a day.

Seems like I just checked for bad links a few weeks ago. The sitemap was also updated over the last few weeks, but the system will not let me back in to make any more changes [not sure way?]...

Added a new page to the Google site covering Capacitor frequency operation. From the "What's new" blog it appears that about one new page a week is added to the main site.

I also notice that one of the interface bus pages has only received 21 page visits since Jan 08. However it may just be that the page covering the Medical Information Bus only has a few sentences of text.

No Google Page Ranking

So I made note of a few pages that did not seem to have a page ranking from Google. Of course this would not be the first posting on this particular topic, but some how it's back at the top of the list. Now I do realize that in some cases the page rank my take a moment to show, I don't always wait that long, but it would seem that these pages lack a page rank;

Definition of Solderless Terminals.
Manufacturers of Plastic Molds.
Equipment Caster Manufacturers.
Manufacturers that produce Equipment Leveling Products.
Definition of Alligator Clips.
Manufacturers that produce Equipment Anti-Vibration Products.

Not sure why I'm listing these few pages, there are many other pages with out a page rank from Google. Oh, I can tell because I run the Google Tool bar which shows a page rank bar.

Browser Compatibility

I just came across one of my pages that does not display correctly in Internet Explorer, I thought those days were over. Of course I might have a coding error on the page. I'm currently using IE 8.

However the page does render correctly in Mozillz Firefox [version 3.5.2] and Google Chrome [version 2.0.172.39]. I use all three broswers; Firefox, Chrome and IE on every power-up.

Unlike years ago I no longer browser check my pages so I don't run older program versions. I also don't run other programs like Safari or Netscape or any others. Oh, the page does display correctly in my HTML editor also.

So the page just shows Intel Processor Release Dates. Not sure why I ever added it, but I see no reason to remove. it

2009 Visitor Data from Google Analytics:
Internet Explorer = 56% [Versions; ver 7.0 = 51%, ver 6.0 = 38%, ver 8.0 = 10%]
Firefox = 34%
Chrome = 3%
Opera = 2.6%
Safari = 2.35%
Mozilla = 0.88%
SeaMonkey = 0.12%
err, that page was viewed 1,075 times this year

Analytic data is in

So it's a new month and I have the data from last month ready to post. I'm unimpressed, the data looks about normal. I still see no improvement, but July may be a slow month.


Two points of note;
1. Page views are up even as Page visits are down (that's good)
2. Server Bandwidth is on the increase (not good)


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.

Analytics Data:
Visits = 180,280
Pageviews = 331,973
Pages/Visit - 1.84
New Visits = 77.59%
Bounce Rate = 72.38

Document Copyright Issues

I was doing a little research the other day looking up some data to support the chassis design section of the web site.

So I pull up this Handbook from the DOE and I'm speed reading, scrolling through the pages really quick. Stopping for a moment as I see some data on equipment rack grounding I like, other wise I keep scrolling.

I scroll past a table with a blue background, and I stop ~ all the tables on my web site once had blue back grounds. It's an Ampacity table for copper wire. Just above the table is data relating to derating wire bundles, just like my site.

Scrolling to the next page I see another table for chassis wire color coding, again copied from me. Even the text above the tables has been lifted. Even a disclaimer I used about not covering Military color coding is used.. The next 5 tables, with text, all from my site.

Now to be fair the data used in the tables covering color coding by voltage and TFE wire Ampacity were both derived from some other DOD standard. However there are two differences here; first any data derived from a military specification did not have a copyright, and second I didn't copy their table I retyped and reformatted the facts.

So what is the issue here?
a. First the US Government does not copyright their information. So if I copy data from a military standard I'm safe, it's free to use.
b. Second, I do copyright my data and it is not free to use. Also my site is not listed in the References section of the document, so I received no credit for the copied data.
c. Third, Once my data was put into that government handbook I lost my copyright because US Gov documents have no copyright ~ so now anyone can re-copy it.
d. Finally, Did my tax dollars pay someone to copy data from my site ~ it's a double hit. I paid someone to undermine my website.
e. Guess what, this posting on site visits (6/20/09) noted a 50% reduction in visits to the page that lost the data [Wire Insulation Color Coding]. All the text and tables that were copied originated from that page.

Notes;
1. For a number of years many tables on the web site had blue back grounds, but a few years ago all the tables were changed to a clear background. Changing the background color was one of a number of changes I made to reduce the bandwidth of the site. A clear background does not require any HTML code, while a colored background requires bgcolor=xxxx (what ever).
2. In some cases the department seal used by some agencies do have restrictions on use. I'm not sure if I can display the DOE seal or not, I know NASA does not like it.
3. The chassis design section covers a few dozen pages and addresses the issues that may come up while designing an equipment chassis, with Equipment Rack data..
4. I will be using data from this handbook, I have already posted a graphic for an equipment rack ~ again there is not copyright covering this DOE Handbook.

Comparing Visits from Different Years

One of the reports from Google Analytics is an overview of visitors from any two dates that are of interest. You can also compare any two sets of date ranges. In this case the graphic to the left compares 1-1-08 to 7-22-08 vs. 1-1-09 to 7-22-09. The graph points [dots] are per week, but you can show data per day or per month. Click the image for a larger view of the data.

Notice that the graph lines appear almost identical. However the data indicates there has been a -0.56% increase visitors from this year to last, or around a decrease of 7000 visitors. That's less than one day worth of visitors, so maybe the site went down a few hours more this year than last.

Not much to worry about until I scroll down the report and review the data on a per page basis. That's when the data starts to look troubling. Here is a sampling of a few of the pages that are in decline, ignoring the few pages that showed an increase in visits.

CANbus -4.24% in visitors.
USB Interface -5.21% in visitors.
interfacebus.com [home page] -15.68% in visitors.
PCIexpress Interface -37.28% in visitors.
RS422 Interface -5.16% in visitors.
SerialATA Interface -7.19% in visitors.

Now these are not buses that are in decline, so there is no reason for these pages to see any decrease. Unlike the RS232 bus that is being left off newer computers; that page also showed a -12.25% decline, but I can deal with that.

So what is the deal with a graph that shows no real decrease, but many pages that seem to be in decline. Well when you check the blog listing new engineering pages, you'll see that over a hundred new pages have been added over the same time frame. So the new pages are leveling out this year even as a number of pages are seeing a reduced number of hits.

Hmm, I happen to be looking for the VME64x pin out today, my page came up first in a Google search but I decided to select the next guys page. Sure enough there's my text, plus a link back to me ~ stay off my site. Guess it's time to start looking at some of these other pages to see what's finding its way onto other websites.

Most of these guys running hardware or engineering sites aren't engineers at all, you can kind of tell by what they copy.

The point here is always spend some time searching the Internet looking for your work. I found a guy a few years back who had copied my PCIe page [and a dozen others], but I had just written the page. It had taken several hours to generate the different pin out tables in HTML, and he grabbed them in a matter of minutes.... Better stop now or I'll start naming names. Oh had two typo's I found weeks later, to bad he missed garbing the up-dates.

Knol is just not working for me

Well maybe Knol is working or maybe it's not. I have about 10 different Knols published of varying lengths, with different generation dates. Some Knols have been out there for months while others were just published, so some have more page views than others for that reason.

The ten Knols out there have been viewed 11,460 times over the last year. Now that number is not so bad for ten random pages on the internet, but there's a bigger issue. Those 11,000 page views have only sent 595 visitors to interfacebus.com, the site that really counts [link is not the main page].

Those incoming visitors have a 67% bounce rate, or 67% of the incoming people only check one page before leaving the site. So for every 19 Knol page views I get one page view at interfacebus.com ~ that doesn't sound that bad, put like that. But only 30% of those new people coming in were interested in the site. err only 178 people had any interest in the main site; now that sounds low.....

I consider the Knols just another web site:
1. Another external site that points to interfacebus
2. Another way to show up in the Search Engine Results [SERP]
----- two unrelated sites may show up on the same page result.
3. The Knols point to a number of my pages, other than the home page
4. The Knols push Page Rank to the pages being pointed to.
5. Another way for new people to find my site.

The dots [points] on the attached graphic are per week for the data range indicated. The data is from Google Analytics, for Referral sources, filtered to show only incoming hits from knol.google.com.

I don't track the amount of time spent working a page, so I can't say if it was worth the effort to work with Knol. However it takes months to get a page going after the Search Engine delays are accounted for.

FYI; the best Knol relates to a general description of Computer Buses, with 3,442 page views and a page rank of 3.

What ever; most of the Knols are to short, so I need to keep spending more time working them. Maybe someday I'll get some visitors from the Knol pages.......

[Text Removed 6-28-2010]

Why do Web Stat Counters Differ

So I was looking at the Manufacturers listing section again, just to see how that section was doing. Looks like there are 95 individual pages that make up the manufacturers section. There are 10 pages that make up the listing of companies that start with the letter 'A', as an example.

The graphic shows two examples of counters that might track incoming visitors, both counters represent page views.

The top counter is from Google Adsense and the bottom counts represents page views from Google Analytics. Both counters require JAVA Script to be enabled in the browser.

But why are the counters so different, there both from Google? The Adsense counter seems to be counting at a higher rate than the Analytics counter. Note the scales differ between each counter.
Click the graphic for a larger image.

Pages with the least amount of visitors;
Component Vendors, 'Us'.
IC Vendors, 'Ap'.
Equipment Manufacturers, 'Go'.
IC Manufacturers, 'Gen'.
These are the bottom 4, but it could be these page were only generated last year and may not be as old as some of the other pages.....

Links from an External Page

One of the data points AWSTATS provides is a listing of Links from External Pages.
AWSTATS is the server side counter used by interfacebus.com.
With the start of the new month the listing is small and still workable. Scrolling down the list the column indicating page visits goes blank, while still indicating hits to the site.

That normally means that another site is directly linking to graphic files on my server [site]. The site is using my graphics from my server. The graphic wasn't copied, it's being used directly from my server ~ using up my bandwidth. Not really sure if I like that better than just taking a copy of my picture file.

So I checked a few of the sites using the largest bandwidth [most hits] and visit the other web site. Once I find the graphic file their linking to, I go back to my server change the name of the pic file and up-date my pages so that they to point to the new file name. I save bandwidth and they end up with a broken link. Some times I'll leave the old file name valid but change the pic file to a graphic of my site address :)

Both sites I check were forums, which normally don't allow people to upload graphics. Web sites normally just take the graphics out-right.

The attached graphic is an example forum site that had copied one of my pic files. Some time last year I changed the file name and had a graphic of my site name up-loaded......

Alexa Demographics

Alexa is one of many web sites that collects data on web site visits, but with Alexa you have to run their tool bar. With out the tool bar they don't collect any data.

So they only gather data from a certain group of people, and not from every one who might visits a site. Because of this I've never worried about the over all stats they display because I know it's only from a small segment of the population. However at the same time, many people also think the opposite.

Any way here is a partial data chart from Alexa for interfacebus.com.

The green represent above average visits from a group, while red represents below average visits. So the web site brings in older male visitors that are highly educated while they are at work.

Click on the image for a larger view of the pic.