Frequently Asked Questions - Last Updated 7/5/06

1. Who runs this site?

I'm Jim Mamoulides, and I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. I maintain this site and the PenHero main site at www.PenHero.com. I've used fountain pens off and on for about 20 years, but really was not a serious collector until about 4 years ago. More about me, my collection, and pens I have for sale can be found there. I want the PenBookmarks site to stand on its own and not be perceived as a "traffic pull" for sales on my other site.

2. How did you find all those links?

Over time I accumulated a LOT of bookmarks (at that time 175+) in my Internet Explorer favorites and I got really tired of managing them. I dumped them to a webpage, cleaned it up, and here it is. I regularly surf pen sites, their links, and use links found on eBay, PenBid, Zoss, Google, Yahoo, and other places to augment the list. You'd be really surprised how many sites have old links or don't have the same links beyond the top 20 or so found on every list. Needless to say, I have spent a few hours surfing and documenting links.

Now, I get a LOT of help from the "link finders", who send in links to pages from all over the world. These people are a key to the growth and health of the site. Some actually check links and report dead or changed ones. I list them every month on the front page.

3. Why are the sites classified the way they are?

I tried to set the site up the way I would if I was using it to surf to other places, as with a Yahoo list. I also classified sites based on a very high level grouping, thus manufacturers, dealers, collector / information sites. I hope these groupings make it easy for you to hop off to where you want to go!

4. Why the current format?

I debated this a lot. The full page with all the links is about 200K total and nearly 500 links, so I figured that would be reasonable to restack the large page into subject focused pages that will load faster on a dial up line. It's cleaner on one page, and it's easier for me to maintain than a bunch of sub-pages, but you have spoken. I did leave the full page version as an option, and I'll monitor traffic on that page. I do think the new format is a bit easier to navigate. Please leave me feedback on what you think.

5. Why are some links duplicated in different sections?

I did this for ease of use. It's not always clear from a links page that a site covers new, used, and repairs, and from the surfer's point of view, I may only be looking for one of those at a particular time. I wanted it to be easy from a topical point of view - "I'm looking for a vintage dealer." rather than try and glob a lot of info into one listing.

6. How long does a site stay "NEW"?

I've decided, for my own personal sanity, to time toggle the "NEW" designation once every 30 days. A site that is new or updated will carry a date stamp in the listing for 60 days. After that, the date stamp will reset / disappear. I think this will be a little more helpful than having a site appear at the end of the month and only show new for a few days. A little more work for me, but I think I now have a method to manage it better.

7. Why did you drop the Pageview counter from the pages?

The little odometer that was at the bottom of the pages was a counter of the number of pageviews on the site. A "pageview" is different than a "hit", where a hit can literally be each and every item sent from the server to the browser, a pageview better indicates how many html pages were actually requested.

I found that this was not a useful indicator of traffic, and may have given the wrong impression about the site itself, and frankly, traffic is more my issue than something to brag about to my users.

8. OK, so what is the actual traffic for the site?

If you are really interested in the actual traffic of the site, here are the facts for August, 2005:

Over 650,000 hits per month
Over 95,000 pageviews per month

The counter really didn't reflect traffic in any meaningful way, so I removed it.

9. Why did you drop the longer copyright statement from the bottom of all the pages?

No matter how cute, too much of a good thing is boring!

10. Why did you add the PenHero site menu bar (on the left of the page)?

I needed to be able to quickly update all the pages easily. The site has over 175 pages as of August, 2003, so managing a bunch of different pages was making me crazy.

11. Do you take advertising?

No. I've been asked this a lot. And you'd think I could justify it by the traffic pull. I don't like advertising on informational sites, especially banners and pop-ups. If I need money to pay for the site, I'll sell some pens on PenHero.com! If for some reason the site becomes really expensive to run, I may reconsider, but it's not a big drain on my resources, so I'm leaving it as is. Enjoy the site! It's free!

12. Why did you change the color of the NEW and UPDATED markings to green?

Several people emailed me to let me know that they could not read the yellow on their screens. I've picked a bright green and bold only. Let's hope that works better.

13. Why not list stationary and other pen supplies sources?

Considering that this list started in September 26, 2001 with 175 links and as of August, 2003, over 800 links, with about 4-5 updates per month, that gives me plenty to do. I don't as of yet even know how large a task it would be to start listing stationary and pen supplies, but as for now, it will need to wait.

Thanks,

Jim Mamoulides