• I'm glad to be able to deliver the second rather sizable addition for this week. Considering the subject of our site, it was inevitable that we would include a story about Reginald J. Mitchell, the engineering genius behind the Spitfire. Personally I'm not very fond of formal "encyclopedia-style" biographies, so I'm particularly glad to present John Dell's essay which takes on a rather personal view of Mitchell's life and achievements. Enjoy his two-part story Mr. Mitchell, Designer of the Spitfire - In Memory of a Brilliant Mind in the Articles section
  
  
• In Modelling, we have a beautiful 1/32 Spitfire Mk.II "Borough of Lambeth" modelled by Hans-Peter Tschanz from Switzerland.

Another new occurrence on the site, introduced yesterday, are commercial ads. Why ads? Well, it is my long-term objective to support - wholly or partially - the cost of the site's operation with ads, and today I'm taking the first step in this direction. I'm not hoping to get a profit - considering the amount of man-hours I'm currently putting into it - but perhaps be able to expand the site with photo galleries, forum and other interactive features, many of which require more sophisticated hosting, more bandwidth or additional software. Time permitting, there's so much more I would like to add.

In this initial period, I will be trying Google textual ads to see how they will perform. Obviously I would like the ads to be relevant to the interests of our visitors. With the Google system, the ads are supposed to be matched automatically with the subject of each page. I understand that it may take one or two weeks for the Google system to "learn" which ads are the right ones, so I'm eager to see how good the results will be.

I hope you will find the ads a meaningful addition to the Spitfire Site.

Labels: history, modelling, site updates, webmaster