Regular visitors to the Flying Lines Web site -- and there are a lot of you already, I'm glad to say -- have noticed that little ads have started popping up on some of the pages. Hey, what's up with that?
The ads are supplied by Google. The search engine giant provides to Webmasters some simple scripts that, when installed on a Web page, makes ads pop up. Google then gets paid by the advertiser so much per click on the ads.
Why would I put these ads on the Flying Lines Web site?
The answer is that it's a fairly painless way to try to pay the bills for setting up and maintaining the FL web site. We've asked for donations from you site users, and some have responded, but at this point it's far away from paying the bills.
When one of you clicks on an ad that shows on the FL web site, a few cents goes into the FL account with Google. When enough money builds up there, they'll send us a check. (At this writing on Feb. 11, 2006, FL's Google account is 60 cents -- so you can see we're not getting rich on it!)
Google has some very clever software that analyzes the content of the Web page and targets the ads to match the interests of someone likely to view the page. That's why most of the ads that show have something to do with model airplanes. The proprietor of some model-related business is paying Google for advertising (I would guess it's by the click, too), and Google is placing the ads before the appropriate audience. If they do a good enough job at it, presumably there will be enough clicks for the advertiser to get some benefit and FL will, too.
I expect that it will be a long time before the ads pay off in any meaningful way for FL, so the donations that we've asked for are still very much needed. You can go to the You Can Help page to see how to make a donation -- if you have PayPal, you can just hit the button.
Message board: Hey, what the world needs is another control-line flying message board, right? Well, Flying Lines provides it. The FL Northwest Message Boards is a place for discussion of CL matters with a uniquely Northwest perspective. Check it out, sign in, and post something to get the ball rolling! It should be fun.
Favorites abound: Since it's winter, there's not much contest news to report, but there's a lot of building and some flying going on. Our Favorite Planes page has generated a lot of interest, with quite a few pictures and notes about the planes having been submitted. Check out the Favorite Planes page and feel free to add your plane to the gallery. Just e-mail the picture and some notes about the plane to the editor, and I'll post it all on the Favorite Planes page.
What happened to the guestbook? Some folks with apparently less than benign motives found our Flying Lines guestbook on the server where it's kept by our host company and started posting messages unrelated to our CL flying activity. I suspect that it's an effort to get us to click on web sites trying to sell something or to deliver some unwanted code to our computers. I have removed the guestbook from the topper frame and added a feedback opportunity.
--jt
This page was updated April 13, 2006