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, 2008), the site gets about 20,000 unique readers each day, pulling up about
60,000 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, so I dare not change
the page for fear of losing the ranking.
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 October, 2008) over 16 million readers and 70 million
pages views.
Each weekday, there are approximately 20,000 unique readers pulling up about 60,000
individual page views, 1,300 zip files, filling bandwidth to about 2.0 GB per day (approximately
65KB per user).
| Category |
Value |
| Unique Visitors: |
20,000 visitors each day
|
| Pages Displayed: |
60,000 pages each day
|
| Zip File Downloads: |
1,300 zip files downloads each day
|
| Bandwidth: |
2000 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, 2008), 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
good enough to work) to fully W3C compliant XHTML Version 1.1 Strict. The whole
site will be written for ASP.NET 3.5 and the NET 3.5 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 400 pages to convert -- as of July, 2008, about 200 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, 1.5 TeraBytes (1,500 GB) of SATA disk space on two drives (approx 750
Gigabytes each), three DVD drives (with full DVD±R/RW, CD±RW, Dual Layer, Blu-Ray and LightScribe),
and 100 watts of 7.1 Dolby sound. Sound goes out of the box from a Creative SoundBlaster XFi Elite
Pro sound card and external control center, piped via optical cable into my Yamaha A/V system.
The box has dual 768MB 8800 GTX video cards displaying Windows Vista Ultimate across 4 flat panel
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.
The hardware of the second box is nearly identical to the primary box, but it runs Windows Server 2008
Enterprise and SQL Server 2008. It runs my own little network with IIS 6 and the full complement of
SharePoint 2007 products.
On the software side, I have all versions of Office from 97 Professional up through 2007 Ultimate, so I can develop
applications on whatever platform a client is using. I also have Visual Studio Version 6 Enterprise for VB6 and VC++
programming, and both Visual Studio Professional 2005 with Visual Studio Tools For Office Second Edition (VSTO SE) and
Visual Studio 2008 Professional for web and NET development and for NET add-ins and class libraries for Office 2003 and 2007.
For NET add-ins for Office, I use Add-In Express (www.add-in-express) For NET. If
you are serious about developing commercial quality NET-based add-ins for Office, I would strongly recommend
the AddIn Express tools. For XML development, I use Altova's XML Spy 2008 Professional, which is the best XML editor
I've ever used, especially for schema development. I have exactly one game on the computer: SimCity 3000, and, yes,
I've built up some pretty cool cities.
Aside from the Microsoft family of products (Windows, SQL Server, Office versions, and Visual Studio versions), I rely on
the following programs.
Having had an MSDN Universal subsciption for 10 years, I have lots of software CDs and DVDs -- somewhere in the
neighborhood of 1,000. The core software -- those that I need to do commercial quality work -- reside on about 75 DVDs.
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 60 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 and
maintained using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 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