You clicked, and the page was there. No login, no paywall, nothing parked between you and what you came for.
That’s on purpose. It wasn’t always true here.
This site ran Google AdSense for years, plus a second network on top of that for about a year. It paid for things. Then the consent banners grew into walls, full-screen demands for permission sitting between a reader and a page they had already clicked on. People were getting stopped at the door of a site that has nothing to hide.
So I pulled it. When I rebuilt the design I left the ad code out from the start, and the bills started coming to me instead.
I started this in 2007. There were other hands on it for a stretch; these days it’s just me, and has been for years.
Where Your Money Goes
- Servers and bandwidth. Boring, relentless, due every month.
- Being there. A town page is worth writing when somebody has actually stood in the town, and getting to a place I haven’t seen yet costs real money.
- Keeping up. Mayors leave, museums close, companies get bought and renamed. Daimler is Mercedes-Benz Group now, and Opel has passed from GM to PSA to Stellantis. There are close to 10,000 pages here, and every one of them is quietly going out of date.
So if this site saved you an hour of digging, or talked you into a town you had never heard of, you can throw something in the hat. Any amount helps, and I mean that literally.
If You’d Rather Not Send Money
Also fine, and I mean that too. Drop me a line when something here is wrong. A museum that shut, a company that changed hands, a street name I got backwards. I can’t stand in 10,000 places twice, so a correction from somebody who actually lives there is worth more than it probably sounds. Got a good photo of your town? Send that. Or hand a page to whoever you know who is planning a trip over here.
Either way, thanks for reading this far. :-)
And if you do send something, it lands with one person and not a company, and it goes right back into the site.
Best regards,
Marcus