What do you Want?

Well, I can’t help you with that, but…

Believe it or not, until a few days ago, I really had no idea why people came to my website. I wrote a few months ago how I had been able to determine what people were looking for when they happened across my URL. A website called Alexa can be used to monitor how people use your site and what they were looking for when they arrived there. The post on Hall Effect Sensors vs. Proxes was written in response to what I found there, and sure as heck I ended up getting more comments on that post than I usually do.

Since then I installed a simple little widget on this blog to gather statistics like this on a daily basis. I was surprised by several of the results that I will share here:

1. I receive between 12 and 20 visits a day on this site. Not bad considering I really have no method of engaging readers other than if they leave a comment. I also don’t use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since this site is not really intended to be commercial in any way. I really just like to have a forum to vent on automation topics.

2. Most visitors to this site arrive here while doing keyword searches. Usually at least 2 or 3 a day also arrive through links from other peoples blogs, specifically Tony’s Software Blog, Gary Mintchell’s Feed Forward, and the ISA blog list. Special thanks to all of you.

I also receive at least 1000 spam posts every day along with fake subscriber sign-ups. I have addressed this also in a previous post. Many of these for some reason originate in Poland. Somehow these hacker/spammers have even managed to hack into this blog so that when I shared a post to a Facebook page or anywhere else a Cialis/Viagra/fake handbag link would appear in the link. This is just pure malicious evil as far as I’m concerned. I am continually surprised that there are people in the world who have this kind of mindset.

3. People are searching for a variety of answers here. Almost half are related to ladder logic and PLC programming specifically. Others are looking for motion control primers, systems integration advice, vision system info, conveyors, feeder bowls, sensors, and whatever else my categories and tags refer to. Now that I know what people are looking for I may address some of these things more often.

* A quick note on ladder logic here: several discussions have taken place on this site about PLC programming tutorials and advice. Tony has mentioned that he really hasn’t found a book that would qualify as an advanced manual on programming. Part of this could be that to write an advanced book you are almost forced to be brand specific. Different platforms use very different techniques. I do plan to write a couple of e-books or tutorials on PLC programming at some point in the future and will make them available for free download on this site, I may even try to get into some of the advanced stuff while trying to be unbiased and generic. I am very busy writing another free e-book on planning and building an automated production line. It will be available on my business site in about a month. I hope to learn enough about making .pdf e-books and setting up the download to make the next ones easier.

So now about the title of this post: What do you Want? I can see what people were looking for when they found my site and will try and cover more of this material in the future. But considering that I must be getting over a hundred visitors to this site every week but people rarely leave comments, what would you like me to cover? If I don’t have expertise in the specific area you need information in I can certainly research it. As part of the work I am doing in my consulting company I will be changing a number of things about both this site and my business site to make them better resources. This includes addressing concerns that readers may have, please let me know what I can do to make your experience on this site better.

Thanks in advance!