This page of the site lists some stats about the domain, and some accounts of its history.
Website Hits:
The website receives between 4,000 and 5,500 hits each day. Displayed below is a sample of hits during this particular week...
The most hits ever was 6,754 and occured in February 2007. I am impressed and grateful for this considerable level of readership. I'm even more intrigued by the fact that the website's number of hits has stayed roughly the same since early 2007; the hits seem to have plateaued and are no longer increasing. The reasoning for this is cause for much speculation; some people have proposed that the target audience has simply been reached. Others have put forth that the site has obtained a critical ratio between the number of viewers finding the site for the first time, and viewers who are just now viewing the site for the last time, causing a balanced-out effect on the hit level.
The amount of data transfer is over 50 gigabytes each month, or 166 thousand megabytes every day.
The website itself uses slightly more than 4 gigabytes of server memory. However, most of this memory consists of bitmap images, high-resolution videos, etc. The actual text pages holding the HTML code are only around 6 megabytes in total; individual pages are only an average of 10 KB, multiply that by about 500 or so individual pages across the entire zdspb.com domain.
And yes, I regularly back the site up in case of crash. The site is backed up just about every time I make a large change, which happens every other week or so. I have an entire separate harddrive devote to it.
| Country: |
Percentage
of visits: |
United States |
71% |
Canada |
7% |
United Kingdom
Germany
France |
2% |
Russia
Portugal
Sweden
Poland |
~1% |
Malaysia
Mexico
Brazil
New Zealand |
<1% |
Czech Repub
Taiwan
Austria
Norway
Switzerland
Spain
Australia
Guam
Isreal
Croatia
Ireland
Hungary
Netherlands
Morocco
Greece
Moldova
Hong Kong
Argentina
Belgium
Serbia
Denmark |
<0.5% |
|
| Browser: |
Percentage
used: |
| Internet Explorer |
59% |
| Firefox |
36% |
| Safari (non-mobile) |
4% |
| AOL browser |
2% |
| Opera |
2% |
| PDAs & Smart Phones |
1% |
| Netscape |
0.33% |
| PlayStation Portable |
0.15% |
|
Most of the sub-0.5% countries give me less than 30 hits each month. If your country isn't listed, then chances are you're all alone out there!
The most common website providing a link to this domain is pbnation.com. Other sites include wikipeida.org (paintball marker pages), assorted magazine websites, and other varied online forums. The rest of the referrals are through e-mail, or saved internet pages on harddrive.
The most common search queries are: Paintball tech articles, Smart Parts tech, Ion tech, Shocker tech.
Site History:
I was interested in website design as a hobby throughout high school, so I used that skill combined with my then-new-found interest for paintball into a small website devote to it. Due to being a broke teenager, I didn't have the money for an actual website. This lead me to using Angelfire.com's free hosting for several years. The original website from 2001 looked like this.
Angelfire and I didn't get along well. They liked to screw with the bandwidth limits for their free sites, which sometimes forced me pay a fee for hosting because they had just shrunk the allotted webspace right out from under me, and I was then over their limit (for instance, they'd reduce the limit from 10-MB to 3-MB). But then they would increase it back up the next month, and do it again. That, combined with the rash of popups and sex pill banner ads, urged me to switch servers when I realized how much better it would be.
When that finally happened in 2004, I switched over to Yahoo webhosting, and that's where the website will stay unless Yahoo goes nuts on me too. It's good service, easy to use, and provides all sorts of page-making tools and management methods. The original splashpage layout looked like this (some of those links do work).
Currently, I'm in complete control of the content (besides for Yahoo's traffic-tracking bots) so there's no spyware or virii to be found here. To verify, check McAfee's virus/malware scan.
Contact:
If you wish to contact me, do not use the whois information for the zdspb domain. It's there for legal purposes only and you won't be able to reach anyone through it. Send me an e-mail to ydna@zdspb.com.
Website Design & Maintenance:
If you're interested to hear how this website was created, here are some of the programs I used in doing so.
ˇ FTP & file transfer: FileZilla is the best. I formally used SmartFTP but they periodically force you to re-install the program to keep it free, so I gave it up.
ˇ Website programming: HTML is hand-written using Notepad++ and saved directly onto the site using yahoo's file manager suite. Originally I've used Dreamweaver in the past, but I often find it too elaborate for my needs.
ˇ Graphics design/editing: Photoshop CS3 is used for most image and diagram editing. I currently use CS3 but most of the site was originally made using CS2's ImageReady program. For many simple and quick editing tasks, I use the program Paint.net. Before discovering Paint.net I was fond of MS Paint for simple editing.
ˇ Animation editing (.gif files): Animation Shop 3 (formally owned by Jasc Software).
ˇ Video editing: Most is done using Uled Video Studio or Premier Pro CS3. Video conversion is made using Movavi Video Suite or Quickmediaconverter.
ˇ Data entry: I use Micosoft Excel fairly frequently when gathering data. Vernier Software's Graphical Analysis is used for graph production.
ˇ Business records: Microsoft Access 2007 conducts my databases.
ˇ E-mail client: I previously used Eudora, however currently use Thunderbird (until the new Eudora is released anyway).
ˇ Anti-Virus: Spyware Doctor, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, PeerGuardian2, Symantec Client Security, ProcessExplorer, and Norton Suite 2007.
ˇ Internet browsing: Internet Explorer 7 most of the time. I use Firefox when IE fails on me (such as when uploading to YouTube).
ˇ Camera: Most of the pictures visible on the site were taken using a Cannon Powershot A550 (7.1 megapixel). This camera can obviously take extremely detailed photos when properly used, despite being a reasonably basic household camera ($170 new at time of purchase). I also have a less-powerful Powershot A520 that I carry around and beat up.
I run several computer systems including one in the office and another in the workshop, but my most powerful computer is my engineering workstation. I know a thing or two about computers and enjoy building them by hand...this one uses an Intel Quad Q9450 processor (1333-MB frontside bus @ 2.66-GHz per core) on an Asus P5K-PRO motherboard. I use an Ultra Chill-TEC thermoelectric cooling unit which keeps the system running under 30ēC at all times. I use 8-GB 800-MHz RAM memory, graphics card is an ATI FireGL v7200 utilizing dual 20" LCD displays. I dual-boot Vista 64-bit and XP 32-bit depending on which applications will be ran at once (some engineering software requires an expensive upgrade to 64-bit, other packages offer free upgrades).
