Tag Archives: SealFAQs

mechanical seal, Wikipedia

SealFAQs Statistics

SealFAQs has been officially launched for one month.  Here are the statistics for the month of January 2018 according to Awstats (Advanced Web Statistics).

SealFAQs had 1015 unique visitors and a total of 1407 visits (1.38 visits/visitor).  This means that some visitors returned for an additional look!  Visitors averaged looking at 2.7 pages per visit.  There were even more visits by the various bots and such that traverse the Internet — most of these bots were from search engines.

Visits per day averages 44 and the number of daily visits is slowly increasing.  Most people visit during the week and the middle part of the day – which I take as meaning that people are visiting SealFAQs from their work site.  This is a good sign to me.

By far, the most visitors are from the United States and distantly followed by India, Russia, China, Canada, Great Britain and others.

Visits average about 135 seconds in duration but most visits are for less than 30 seconds.  This is probably not a good sign.  Perhaps people are misled about the content of SealFAQs or have difficulty finding their way around?

As expected, access is predominately via the Windows operating system (83%) but 47% of the browsers are Google Chrome whereas Internet Explorer is used by 27% and Firefox by 11%.

Google’s search engine predominates the source of the links to SealFAQs.

There are a few links from the Wikipedia article on end face mechanical seals but those will probably disappear because the Wikipedia editors did not like linking to SealFAQs and have removed that link.

All in all, I’m well pleased with the first month of traffic to SealFAQs.  To be sure, SealFAQs is not a major web attraction but at least it is drawing some attention.

end face mechanical seal, mechanical seal, Photography, Uncategorized, Wikipedia

Wikipedia Gripes

We interrupt the series on cell phone documentation to gripe about Wikipedia …

Previously, I posted about editing the end face mechanical seals article on Wikipedia.   Those edits are still holding as written.  However, the editors at Wikipedia did not like my link back to this site so it has been removed.  They said that SealFAQs was a self published blog and therefore a conflict of interest.  They also removed links to SealFAQs that I’d placed in a few other articles.  Surprisingly, they allowed a link to a commercial seal distributor!

Not my day at Wikipedia.  Unrelated to mechanical seals, I had created an article about my great, great, great grandfather, William Calmes Buck who was a noted Baptist preacher in the 1800s.  My submission was declined on the basis that, as a relative, I had a conflict of interest.    They also did not like that I used his memoirs as a major reference.  The article is still on Wikipedia but as a draft.  I’ve appealed and am modifying the references as requested but expect it will not be acceptable.

Oh well.

… and now we return to cell phone photography.

 

 

Uncategorized

The Background of SealFAQs

Shortly after learning what a mechanical seal was, and as I learned more, I began to think about writing a book on mechanical seals. At the time (early 1970s) there just didn’t seem to be much information available on the engineering aspects of mechanical seals.  I collected what information I could and, over the years, began to organize my book.  Over those same years, more and more information about mechanical seals became available – plus I found many books and articles that had been previously overlooked.

By the time I retired from John Crane Inc. at the end of 2014, there almost didn’t appear to be a need for my book on mechanical seals.  In particular, Dr. A. O. Lebeck’s book, Principles and Design of Mechanical Face Seals, is so comprehensive that there was little need for my own thoughts on mechanical seal theory.  Still, I reviewed my past publications and paper files and made plans for my own book.  It was a daunting task.  Who would publish my book?  Who would buy it?

I considered self-publishing. I had some experience with Blurb (shameless plug here for my dad’s memoirs and my own book of photographs) but then remembered that I had never received even one single dollar from Blurb.  Making money from my book on seals was not my primary objective but would have been nice.  I also considered Amazon self-publishing for a digital version of my seals book.  An Amazon ebook had considerable appeal but as I learned more, this publishing format seemed limiting, especially considering the many equations, graphs and illustrations that my book would have.  I became frustrated with the whole idea.

My frustration (and realization that there was no money to be made) inspired me to consider making a website about mechanical seals. After all, some of my friends and co-workers have been telling me for years that mechanical seals were actually a hobby for me.  I began to consider my options for making a website.  Actually, I already had a blog about my Buck family genealogy so I knew a little about making a site.  After a little research, I decided to use WordPress to develop my site and BlueHost to host the site.  I came up with the name “SealFAQs” as meaningful and unclaimed.  I outlined my site and jumped right into developing it.

My first efforts with SealFAQs were so frustrating and the results so bad that I temporarily gave up. Instead, I started a simple blog in order to learn and practice WordPress.  After a few months, I returned to working on SealFAQs in 2017.

SealFAQs is far from complete but I’ve decided to “launch” it now and continue to develop it. As a result, some (not too many though) of the site pages are blank – just a place marker.  However, these pages will be filled out in the coming months.  Also, other pages might look a bit rough but are useable and will be tidied up eventually.

Fortunately, I’ve already published so much about mechanical seals that there is a wealth of material already in the public domain from which to draw. I hope that SealFAQs will be a useful site and that you will visit it frequently.