administrivia: new conceptions about digest.net

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

John Meister, who put me up to setting up the fsj, xj, and diesel-benz
lists on digest.net, floated an idea past me the other day.

it's not a new one, it's what off-road.com has sort of been up to.
off-road.com hosts the precursors to the fsj and xj lists on this server
(but that's a story for another day and time.) they also provide for some
sense of "community" amongst their visitors/list members, etc. we have a
lot of that, but the idea is to expand on it.

the idea is to devote some web space to list member pages about their cars,
or their car hobby, or their car related hobby. the ftp product i'm using
permits ftp only accounts; web space can be allocated in small quantities
(2-3Mbytes) on the request of a list member. the pages would fall in
suitable locations under www.digest.net, for example,

/bmw/fred-barney/

for Fred Barney's bmw pages.

i could also (and perhaps this would be better) set up

http://members.digest.net/bmw/fred-barney/

and group pages for list members that way.

there are about 700Mbytes free on the /web partition right now; i have 2.6G
"squirrelled away for later" which could be cleared out in short order if i
wanted to make it available for this usage. these would be free pages (no
email or shell account); the premise would be that on demonstration of a
large and active community with good page impression rates, we might pull
in some good advertising to help cover the costs of running the server.

the pages would also be restricted in content to cars, obviously, and to
reasonable taste.

any thoughts from anyone on this?

cheers,
  richard