I wish you a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I do hope that 2018 will be a happy, healthy & successful year for you and for all of your family.
2018 will be quite an important year for Stirnet as I really must get to grips with the upgrade to https (not as much progress has been made on that as I had hoped) and generally find a way to deal with those annoying browsers which keep changing and making things difficult for small commercial sites such as this one. I suppose they mean well but …
I will not reach the target of 300 new pages for the Families Database in 2017 but there have been many non-Stirnet distractions, not least the birth of a second grandchild. However, many improvements have been made to existing pages. They are important to me also so I think that overall it has been a quite good year from the Database-Development point of view. Nevertheless, the problems with the Login & Registration module (which I think are due to changes by the browsers) have reduced the number of subscriptions received, which is a bit concerning.
The number of people visiting the site in 2017 is up compared with 2016 but the number of pages viewed is down, probably affected by the above-mentioned problems. I do not report much on the site’s statistics, there is just a section called Statistics low on the History of the site page, but you may be interested to know that early 2018 should show Stirnet reaching a milestone – 4 million visits to the site since the beginning of 2008 – whilst another milestone should be reached sometime in 2019: 50 million page views since the beginning of 2008. Not bad for what is essentially just a one-man site! I have still not done any marketing of the site but I am aware that some of you have been doing that for me by telling others about the site. Thank you for that. The technical challenges make running this site rather frustrating at times but the positive feedback & support from so many of you has made up for it.
With kind regards,
Peter Barns-Graham