About The cpearson.com Web Site
This page provides some background information about the web site.
Thank you for your interest in the web site. I started the site back in 1997 primarily as a way to learn
Microsoft FrontPage and some HTML. I remember in the early days getting upwards of 100 readers a day. I thought
I was king of the world. At present (October 2007), the site gets over 14,000 unique readers each day, pulling up about
50,000 individual HTML and ASPX pages. In the early days, the site consisted of all of three pages: Welcome, Excel Formulas,
and Excel Macros. That was it. The Excel Formulas page is still around, and that page is the TOP
link in ALL of Google for a search on Excel Formulas. Not bad at all, if I may say so.
I had no idea when I started the site how large it would grow and how popular it would become over the years. Readership has grown
to 14,000 readers each day, pulling up 50,000 individual pages. There are over 260 individual pages on the site (and only a single
page advertising my consulting business) and over 170 downloadable zip files. Since I started keeping track of users in 1998,
there have been over ten million readers, pulling up nearly fifty million page views, and, since 2003, over a million file
downloads.
I welcome feedback of any sort: topic suggestions, bug fixes, and even the occassional thank you. You can email me at
chip@cpearson.com. I do read all the email I receive, even
if I don't respond to all of it. The volume of mail precludes an individual reply to every email.
For information regarding Copyrights, Trademarks, and liability, please read the
Legal Page
Since I started keeping statistics, the web site has seen (as of November, 2007) over 11 million readers and 50 million
pages views.
Each weekday, there are approximately 14,000 unique readers pulling up about 50,000
individual page views, 1,300 zip files, filling bandwidth to about 900MB per day (approximately
65KB per user).
| Category |
Value |
| Unique Visitors: |
14,000 visitors each day
|
| Pages Displayed: |
50,000 pages each day
|
| Zip File Downloads: |
1,300 zip files downloads each day
|
| Bandwidth: |
2,500 MB data transfer each day (approx 200KB per visitor)
|
| User Browsers: |
Internet Explorer 6: 48% |
| |
Internet Explorer 7: 18% |
| |
FireFox: 15% |
| |
Netscape: 3%
|
| User Operating Systems: |
Windows XP: 72% |
| |
Windows Vista: 3% |
| |
Windows 2000: 8% |
| |
Other (Mac, Linux, Win 9x): 17% |
| Geographics |
|
|
USA 45% |
|
Unknown 18% |
| |
UK 10% |
| |
Canada 5% |
|
135 other countries 22% |
The web site has gone through several design iterations over the years. At present
(October, 2007), I am in the midst of the largest reconfiguration so far. The entire
site is being converted from crude and simple HTML (not well formed, just formatted
well enough to work) to fully W3C compliant XHTML Version 1.1 Strict. The whole
site will be written for ASP.NET 2.0 and the NET 3.0 Framework. In order to make the transition as smooth
as possible and to ensure that all the pages on the site have a consistant look and feel, I am using the
ASP.NET Master/Content model. In this model, a Master page acts as a template and container for content pages. The
master provides the page banner and all the navigation controls within the frame
at the bottom of the page, and designates a region in which the content is placed.
To change the structure of the pages, only the Master page need be updated, and
IIS (Internet Information Server) on the server will automatically rebuild the pages
with the modified Master. Thus, only the single Master page needs to be changed
in order to restructure all the pages.
I am also making use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the appearance of
the content. Instead of using <font> tags all over the text (which made formatting
difficult), all text presentation is defined by CSS classes, all stored in a single
CSS file. Thus, any type of text presentation(narrative, code, XML, etc) can be
changed simply by changing the class attributes in the single CSS file. This will
ensure that text in all pages has a consistent format. That is, all narrative will
be one style, code samples will have another style, and so on.
As navigation aids for the web site, the ASP pages (the conversion from HTML to
ASP.NET will take some time -- there are over 260 pages to convert -- as of October 2007, about 110 page have been converted)
have a set of buttons to navigate to common pages. Also, there is control to select and go to
any page on the site. The pages also have a list of related pages. Thus, if you
are reading one page, you will have links to other pages related to that page.
I also added a "Rate This Page" control. This is for you, the reader, to indicate
how helpful a particular page is. I review these results and if a page is consistently
rate low, I know then that I need to rewrite the page. I strongly encourage you
to use the page rating feature. It is the only way I know whether a page is useful
or not.
So what kind of computer do I have? Several have asked. I have two desktops
and a laptop, all Dells. I just bought a new primary desktop, a top-end Dell XPS
720 H2C. It has a quad-core, liquid-cooled Intel CPU running at 3.1 GHz, 4 GB of
1066 MHz DDR2 RAM, 1.6 TeraBytes (1600 GB) of SATA disk space on two drives (approx 750
Gigabytes each), three DVD drives (with full DVD±RW, CD±RW, Dual Layer, Blu-Ray and LightScribe),
and 100 watts of 7.1 Dolby sound. It has dual 768MB 8800 GTX video cards
displaying Windows across 4 flat panel NEC displays (3 X 19", 1 X 24"). It is powered by a
massive 1000 Watt power supply and runs Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. It is
fast, fast, fast. I connect to the internet via cable modem, and if the upstream
server is capable, I can get up to 2 MBYTES/second (that's Bytes not Bits) transfer speed.
On the software side, I have all versions of Office from 97 Professional up through 2007 Ultimate, so I can develop
applications on whatever platforms my clients are using. I also have Visual Studio Version 6 for VB and VC++ programming, and
Visual Studio Professional 2005 with Visual Studio Tools For Office Second Edition (VSTO SE) for web and NET developmenet and for
NET add-ins and class libraries for Office 2003 and 2007. For XML development, I use Altova's XML Spy 2008, which the the best XML
editor I've ever used, especially for schema development. I have DesaWare's Universal COM component library for advanced VB development.
I have exactly one game on the computer: SimCity 3000, and, yes, I've built up some pretty cool cities.
I've been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the Excel product group for 10 years. The MVP award is given for technical
expertise and for sharing that expertise with the world at large. I've posted well over 20,000 replies in the Excel related
USENET newsgroups and have served up nearly 50 million HTML and ASP pages on the web site.
The site was initially developed using Microsoft FrontPage, from 97 through 2003, and is presently written using
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
The site has benefited from the generosity of some other authors:
The "Cells Within Ranges" page is © Copyright 1997, Alan Beban and is used
with his kind permission.
The "Call Function" and "Hidden Name Space" were written by © Copyright 1998,
Laurent Longre and used with permission.
The "Introduction To Pivot Tables" page was contributed by Harald Staff.
The "Direct Connections To MSNEWS" was written by Len Meads.
All the VB/VBA procedures and Excel formulas are explicitly granted to the
Public Domain and may be used in any manner without permission, although an
acknowledgement is nice. The narrative on all the pages is © Copyright, 1997 -
2007 by Charles H Pearson.
This page last modified: 25-June-2007