Tell me who visits the site

Engineering companies that visited interfacebus.com this year.
Determined by their Network Location as reported by Google Analytics

The ranking is provided by Google, as are the network names.
The missing ranking's are normal commercial internet providers.
Of course no one company will out perform a large internet provider.
Ranking by # of visitors
23. raytheon company 7,089 visits
34. lockheed martin corporation 5,859 visits
38. northrop grumman corp. 4,778 visits
43. navy network information center (nnic)  4,583 visits
45. 754th electronic systems group 4,470 visits
47. computer sciences corporation 4,183 visits
49. vitro corporation 4,109 visits
50. honeywell international inc. 4,027 visits
51. general electric company 4,010 visits
53. the boeing company 3,930 visits
56. intel corporation 3,850
59. national aeronautics and space administration 3,631 visits
61. l-3 communications corporation 3,568 visits
68. headquarters usaisc 3,366 visits
87. texas instruments 2,412 visits
88. rockwell international corporation 2,395 visits
90. dod network information center 2,296 visits
92. cisco systems inc. 2,260 visits
98. hewlett-packard company 2,200 visits
106. harris corporation 2,064 visits
108. level 3 communications inc. 1,994 visits
122. itt aerospace/communications division 1,800 visits

This data is from 1/1/09 to 10/17/09
Just as an example Raytheon [#23] sent in a consistent average of 180 visits per week.
The ones that got my notice were the military sites which were out performing a number of other companies;
DOD sites: #43, 45, 68, and #90, I had to look up #68 I never heard of them [United States Army Information Systems Command].

Can I do any thing with this data, no but it's interesting to pull up every few years...

Photo credit; US Navy: USS Nimitz.

I'm sending Spam mail to myself

Of the 24 e-mails I've received in the last 5 hours today Google has sent all of them into my spam box, four are from me. Yea, that's right my e-mail address is sending me spam. Ok not really, that's just how insecure email really is. You can make it look like an email comes from any one. For years now I've been reading about how 'they' were going to change things and make email more secure or reliable , but still no action.

Of course I don't read these incoming e-mails that get redirected into the spam folder. After years of using Gmail I haven't seen a mistake yet, well maybe one out of thousands of emails [maybe one a few years ago].  But Google and Gmail is pretty good about catching most if not all spam and directing all of them into my spam folder so I don't have to deal with them.

My other gmail account doesn't even display the spam folder any more. The older account always had [or has] 1000's of spam e-mails in the spam folder at any one time and I couldn't even delete them fast enough. Guess Gmail picked up on that.

So anyway my point is, how many people realize they send out spam mail, or really that somebody else is sending out spam email in their name. Any way; Google knows this trick, so classifies the message as Spam, and advises you that it has come from your address , replacing that by "from me". It guesses that since the message isn't in your Sent Mail display that it's a spoof, and even tells you so!

Any way if you ever get an email from interfacebus it doesn't really mean it came from me.

The graphic is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.

Blog Feedburner Status

Here is another look at how Feedburner for the Blog is doing, and I'm not to sure how this chart differs from the one in the Blog about Feedburner Stats [below]. But it would appear that some where between 50 and 90 people are reading the Feed each day [ignoring the days with zero views].

Now a previous posting talking about blog visits showed a graph with about 60 plus a-day, so I guess Feedburner may be helping [Free Blog Space and SEO Stuff].

Because normal blog visits appear to be remaining about the same, that implies that I'm keeping my visitors to the blog and gaining visitors to the blog feed [I guess]. Referrals to interfacebus from blogspot have not appeared to change. Feed burner also shows a map of visitor locations, but it appears that the only people reading the feed are from the US and Canada.

Related Postings;
Feedburner Stats; 10/5/09.
I'm Burning Feeds Again; 9/28/09.
Graphic: Aggregate Item Use, number of people viewing the feed.

Visitors by Web Browser

Just in case any one is still following the Browser wars. The chart shows the type of browser used by visitors to the web site so far this year. Click the graphic for a larger image. The related links below provide graphs of previous years data. All the data shown here is from Google Analyics for visitors to the interface bus site.


Browser Comparison
       Firefox vs. Internet Explorer
2009 = 34.12% vs. 56.22%
2008 = 30.01% vs. 63.36%
2007 = 25.10% vs. 69.06%
2006 = 20.93% vs. 73.08%

Related Postings.
Is there a Browser War, 6/11/08.
Web Browser Issues, 7/4/06.

You can see from the chart that Google Chrome which just started a year ago is already getting 3% of the traffic or users, winning out over Opera.

Googlebot Crawl Rate

I took a look at how Google's spider was reading my site today. The search engine spider used by Google is called Googlebot. So far this month Googlebot has used up 43MB of bandwidth [as seen by AWSTATS]. Last month Googlebot used 64 MegaBytes of bandwidth via 7327 hits to the server. The attached graphic shows a high of 1,184 hits with an average of 557 hits and a low of 198 hits per day. The website update rate is;
Oct.: 202 page updates
Sep.: 336 pages updates
Aug.; 253 page updates
July; 165 page updates
So it would appear that Google is just barely picking up on the pages that get updated, if only because Googlebot will sometimes reread the same page more than once.

Related Posts;

Googlebot Crawl Stats; Jan 11 2009.
Spider Crawl Stats; Oct 24 2008.
Googlebot Crawl Stats; July 4 2008.
Robot Visits; Sep 14 2007.
Google Crawl Rate; April 14 2007.
Each one of these older posts provides a graphic of the crawl rate.

Yearly High in Unique Visitors

I blogged on Friday about the number of hits or visits coming in because I noticed an increase during a month that normally shows an average amount of visits. The previous day I noted that the incoming visits had amounted to the second largest number of visitors during the year. [Seasonal Fluctuations of Web Visits]

Well yesterday just became the day that received the largest amount of visitors for the entire year. Yesterday ended up with just a tad over 9,000 visitors for the day, or maybe about a hundred over the previous high. Now it's common to see days producing 8,800 visitors, and even more common to see visits in the 8,500 range, but the important point to note here is that the count went over 9,000.

I can't tell why the visitors are increasing; how ever there are a few reasons that come to mind. Perhaps some new page additions just got spidered [found by the search engine], maybe some of the pages added over the last month or so just made it into the Search Engine Pages [SEPs], or maybe some of the page enhancements made over the last month are bringing in new visitors. But really there is just no way to tell why I'm seeing an increase.

Remember it takes time for a search engine to find any changes to your web site. Normally I assume about 15 days before Google finds or reads one of my pages. Another 30 days before a page really starts to show up in the search results [if at all], and another 3 months before that new page receives a Page Rank [if it ever gets a page rank]. However because I post new pages additions out to Blogger [New Engineering Additions], Google really sees the new page address the same day, but I'll bet it does not go out and read it then. Of course Google re-orders their listing every month so maybe I just show up higher in the results now, and has zero to do with any updates....

Graphic; Monthly History AWSTATS: 1/1/09 to 10/13/09

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