From the home page:  “We don’t just sell old postcards, we tell the stories”.  No pun intended, but there’s a back-story to this.  It used to say “We don’t just sell the cards …” but as we understood how important the home page is to search engines, we added “old”.  Guess how many entries for “cards” come up in Google?  As of now, 4,630,000,000.  Not too useful for us.  How about “old postcards”?  73,100,000.  Not too useful there, either, but 63X better than before.  Every little bit helps.

 

The real story here is why we tell stories at all.  Most sites just show images and maybe a short technical description of size and condition.  A few sites also scan the reverse, but we don’t, because of those names and addresses.  Very few sites put their cards into any context, as we try to do much of the time.

 

Our information mostly comes from:

 

*  Personal experience — likely to be accurate, at least when we were there

*  Wikipedia — so useful

*  Card-specific online sources — as, for example, a hospital’s own website

*  Online reviews — trust these at your own risk

*  Consolidator websites — e.g., air crashes by planes’ registration numbers

*  The cards’ captions and messages themselves

 

The two most obvious problems with all this are:

 

*  The internet is not always our friend.  People post whatever they want, without challenge (usually) and often wrong.

*  Information goes out of date.  For a good example of this, go back ten years and check any list of the world’s tallest buildings.  Check again for 2018.

 

Our descriptions are static, not dynamic.  With 40,000 entries we can’t review them every day for updates.  If we see something glaring, we fix it.

 

Onward!