We are now open to two kinds of advertising:

(1) Corporate awareness ads on the home page down the left hand column

- corporate logo, name and explanatory slogan or phrase if you want

- width 248 pixels, standard height 50 pixels

- the ad can be linked to your website home page or to special advertising copy on your website which you are responsible for and control and change

- price is $250 for 3 months, $800 for one year for 50 pixels high, proportionately more for greater heights, so for example 90 pixels high is $450/3mths, $1,440/yr (NOTE: these prices apply to ads contracted after 30 Sept 2006)

- the column of corporate ads display on the home page, and also will soon display on the ARCHIVES and SEARCH pages also

- Top Gun position at the head of the column is a special price and is already taken through Nov 2007

- please supply professional artwork or submit to the best efforts of a Photoshop hack

(2) Personnel, notices, or RFPs

- ads for personnel, notices, RFPs, partners sought... whatever

- heading goes in BRIEFS column on rightside of home page with link to text on an inside page

- send us text and logo

- $25 per hundred words per week

Usage

At left are some statistics of visits to the website as recorded by the Internet Service Provider (ISP)

Contact petersamuel@mac.com or 301 631 1148

Webmaster's comments

I asked an experienced webmaster what to make of these numbers. His comments follow:

"Number of Visitors" is the number of different individual users that access the website in that time period.

"Pages" is the number of individual webpages downloaded in that time period. Your main page is one webpage, and a single article is one webpage.

"Hits" is the total number of files (objects) downloaded in that time period. Any one webpage could have any number of image files (objects) on it, so a webpage with 6 images would count as 7 "Hits" each time it was downloaded.

Many people popularly use "Hits" as the main measure of website activity, but I think that "Pages" is a much better measure of activity, since it tracks the number of individual webpages downloaded in that time period.

Of course, just because a user downloads a webpage, doesn't indicate how much they read on the webpage.

"Bandwidth" is the total size of the files downloaded in that time period. In other words if a webpage (html file) is 50K in size, and it has an image (jpg or gif file) that is 112K in size, and it has another image (jpg or gif file) that is 34K in size, each time that webpage was downloaded by a web user, it would add 196K to Bandwidth.

Given the sharp focus of the tollroad and highway subject, you average of 2,500 to 3,000 page downloads per weekday, I consider to be substantial usage.

Users can easily print your articles, and can easily copy them to their own computer, for future reading, and those future accesses would not be from your website, so they would be continued usage of your articles, but would not add to the website counters. In other words, usage of your articles goes well beyond what is tracked on your website tracking statistics. END QUOTE

REVISED as of 2006-09-30