[alfa] administrivia: assistance requested

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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this is primarily aimed at the trackheads among you, but it bears on the
future of digest finances, so others may want to read through for
informational purposes.

first, some context: one of the things on the server (besides mailing lists)
is a large web page complex that i wrote back in the 90s that was and
to some degree still is popular with racers, but which has been fairly
neglected for a few years now. these pages are at
http://www.na-motorsports.com/, and it is the race track section at
http://www.na-motorsports.com/Tracks/ that seems to be the most
interesting and useful.

in order to help fund the server operations, i've experimented with various
banner ad programs over the years, with mixed and mostly unimpressive
results. the program i'd used in recent years, valueclick, was producing
perhaps $10 to $20 a month, which isn't much in the overall scheme of
things.

in january, i turned up google's adsense program, and it has made all the
difference in the world. the improvement is not enough to fund operations
in their entirety, but it's a pretty significant advance, which i discovered
when i got the first check in my hand a couple of days ago. 

NOTE: do NOT go to the pages and start clicking through in order to
"help". google has defensive software in place to spot this sort of help.
i've already gotten a couple of emails from google's automated
system informing me of disqualified clicks due to this sort of activity.

because of the dramatic improvement coming from google, i'm now
starting to take some very specific steps, as i'm rather heartened by
this and want to run with it.

chief among these is that i'm starting to make an effort to fix a lot of
things that are outdated on the pages, and to finish various upgrades
that were slowly making progress. if any trackheads out there want
to review pages for tracks that they know well, and inform me of
problems, i'd appreciate it. i know that there's a serious need for work
on the road america page, for one. a lot of the info is quite out of
date there. i also know there are out of date phone numbers (changing
area codes and all that) and the like.

among the initiatives that are stumbling along are adding hotel,
restaurant, google search, and weather channel entries to each
page. the lime rock page is a good example of how these are
supposed to look on an up-to-date page:

   http://www.na-motorsports.com/Tracks/LimeRock.php

if you see a page which isn't set up with these yet, just drop
me an email. note that pages that have been revised within
the past several days all have .php extensions (instead of
.html), as i'm starting a migration to an easier to maintain setup.

ideally, the pages would also include hot laps, and general
info for racers and workers who might be heading to a track for
the first time.

if i can fix up these out of date page issues, i can probably bring
the page views up, and that will serve to bring the ad revenues
up (google is click through, but they are very good at delivering
relevant ads, so they pay better than others.)

the other thing that is going to happen is that as i prepare to roll
the new server out (within the month of April, i hope), i plan
to make sure that google ads are at the top of all the archive pages.
the archive rebuild will also include a switch from the current,
somewhat broken MARC search to htdig, which looks to be a much
better search engine. making archive searches work better may well
have a similar positive effect on matters.

richard

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-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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