Captain's Log

Friday, April 4, 2008

Associate Editor Chris Ralph exhibited at the GPAA Gold & Treasure show in Salem for us on the weekend of March 29-30. He said attendance was pretty good, with over 1,600 on the first day.

Chris' latest article submission is on how geologic models can be utilized by prospectors out in the field. His other article will be on the use of GPS devices for locating historic gold deposits and for staking claims. Both will likely appear in the May 2008 issue, though we haven't finalized the article list.

The April issue was one of our more challenging ones. Just prior to assembling the pages we realized that we had too much advertising. We had to add another eight pages, complete the layout and still make our deadline. We accomplished our goal, but we didn't get much sleep for a few days.

The gold price, along with the other precious metals, dropped quite a bit over the past week. A combination of profit taking and an announcement by the International Monetary Fund likely had the most influence on the price of gold -- the IMF announced they would be selling up to 400 tons of gold to raise cash. 

Our live metal prices page was loading very slowly for us last week. We obtain the charts on that page from Kitco, and I'm sure they were seeing more activity than usual. We tried switching over to a different chart format to see if the information would load more quickly. 

A few subscribers sent in their comments regarding the new format and requested we return to the old format as soon as possible; apparently, it had been working fine at their end. The page has been restored to the old format -- thanks for your comments!

Chris will be representing us again on April 12-13 at the GPAA Gold & Treasure show in Primm, Nevada. I would like to get out there myself, and take Sally, our advertising manager, to give Chris a hand and to meet all of our loyal subscribers and advertisers, but it doesn't look promising at the moment. We have just been too busy at the office and we're gearing up to put together your May 2008 issue.

Reminder: Please get all your ads and ad changes in by April 10th!

Until next week...

Scott Harn

Editor/Publisher