Features Home

In this issue:

Publisher's Note -info on general site redesign, new pages, new titles to be added and titles to be updated.

Playboy in internet limbo - No respect for an American institution?

USPS Priority Box not well promoted

Lower prices, lower minimums on sleeves

The Hot List - top selling magazines on eBay

My apologies for keeping new and returning subscribers in the dark concerning new developments to the site, but it's been a pretty busy winter. In addition to putting together a fairly complete index of Esquire magazine, I've also been working on pricing info for TV Guide, Vogue, Fortune, and the Saturday Evening Post.

Not to be forgotten, a price guide for Maxim has been completed and updated with the most current sale prices reported.

Once the aforementioned guides are complete to a reasonable level of satisfaction, I'll be able to complete the updating for prices for Playboy, Life, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and complete the National Geographic lists.

In between all of this, I'll be selling a consigned collection including a varied selection of Playboy from 1965 to 2003.

Some of you may have noticed changes in the style and format of many of our pages, and the testing continues. Over the past three months, I've decided to do away with the auction pages because they simply weren't drawing any attention.

Recent additions to the general page navigation structure include:
Directory of magazine and other media sites LINK
A page where you can submit your magazine prices (bought or sold) for inclusion into the price guide LINK
Upgraded classified section with better categories LINK
The re-establishment of our online store, Mostly Magazines LINK

I also tried implementing a subscriptions page, though interest was so low that it seemed to be more of a distraction than anything else.

A few pages are sporting the new design, much in the style of our home page, with two columns and the near complete elimination of banner ads, which, though they produced some revenue, were largely a distraction. I've decided to pretty much stick with Google as our main advertising broker.

I've also been testing some pages employing a popular language, php, which allows for some flexibility in design while maintaining a uniform look throughout. All of the new indices will be written in php, which is read by any standard web browser.

Some have questioned why I don't use Google search on the site, to which I can only respond that the search that has been provided by FreeFind since 1999 still returns better results than Google, which really says a lot about the overall intelligence of the designers and the quality of the world's largest search engine.

I've found, through a great deal of testing that FreeFind's results are far superior to those produced on-site by Google. With the results generated by FreeFind, you can actually FIND what you're looking for on our site. I simply cannot say the same for the Google engine. The goal of a search function - at least as far as my site is concerned - is to FIND things, not produce competing results and a slew of ads.

There's quite a bit more work to be done on the site, not the least of which is the archiving of various articles and newsletters from the past six years. That will be an ongoing project.

Well, that's about it from my perspective. I'm hoping to improve the site, as always, but this is still a one-man operation and it's still not very profitable.

Suggestions are welcome and can be emailed to me here.

Rick Gagliano, Publisher

Next Page 1 2 3