In many ways it's been a year of ups and downs for me and the recent problems with the site wasn't exactly how I wanted to finish off the year - which brings me to the fact that I am glad 99% of it is working again. I'll work in the rest over Christmas as the remaining niggles don't affect members. Once this is done I can resume the other couple of new features I was working on.

I am also pleased to announce that today the site received it's official four millionth visitor. The site logging actually detected 1,657,965 unique visits, making the server a reasonably busy one though around 655,000 of those visits were from robots and are not tallied by the visitor counter. So the site has entered a new era where 2014 saw approximately one million visits from people in a single year.

Here's hoping that 2015 is a better year for all of us. Eat, drink, be merry and be safe.

Can't wish you Aussies a "White Christmas" as I understand it, it gets hot in the winter in Australia.

Have a Merry and a Happy anyway.

It's a good time to mention a few other things too.

I'd like to pay a particular thankyou to those who have gone the extra mile this year with contributions of material for the site. I don't usually like mentioning names because this can lead to forgetting someone though those who have sent in material or have done well with helping new restorers or collectors do deserve a mention in dispatches.

GTC and Marcc have replied to countless posts over the years in response to questions. TV Collector has provided material for Receiver of the Week and his ongoing historical feature on vintage televisions. MonochromeTV has provided reams of PDF files containing useful service data and circuit diagrams. Of course other regulars have contributed too and in reality all members contribute to the success of this site.

One other thing I'd like to mention about this site is the way all members conduct themselves. Whilst it is human nature to 'test the water' occasionally with a bending of the rules, everyone goes out of their way to be polite, helpful and co-operative. More to the point, this happens despite the broad knowledge that there are no active moderators watching over to make sure this is happening. It makes this site unique. Another forum (not a vintage radio one) I am a member of is quite similar to this one in that it has a membership of less than 10,000, is hosted on a home-brewed forum system and was originally only moderated by its owner. It has recently been sold to someone who doesn't have an interest in the subject covered by the forum's community and this has caused an outbreak of jealousy, resent and in a few isolated cases, derisive behaviour towards the new owner. This is unfortunate and is a prime example of what can happen when peoples' attention is taken away from what is most important. Everyone here has done their bit to stop something like this happening and it is thus a privilege for me to be the owner of the site and I am hoping that this can continue in the years ahead.

Over the holiday period I will be working on the big feature that everyone wants - the ability to post images in forum comments. This was about half finished by the time we had our little stability problem about a month ago. Work will recommence on this and it should be ready for final testing in a few weeks - hopefully. As mentioned previously, the inclusion of this feature will mean the discontinuing of the narrow version of the site. The software the narrow site is using is not suitable for the inclusion of the photo posting feature despite appearing the same as the wide site visually. The narrow site also has no SSL support. So at some time in the first week of 2015 the narrow site will be taken down and the URL redirected to the main site. Those members with old 4:3 monitors may need to purchase a newer model if their screen cannot display a width of 1280 pixels. Now is the time to sit on Father Christmas' knee!

And a big thank you, Brad, for providing the site. I'm always happy to help however I can and I do appreciate the thanks.

It will be nice to be able to upload images directly, and I look forward to that feature being implemented.

Hi All

I just popped in to wish each and every one of you a Very Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

May you all have wonderful safe happy time during the holiday season and I can hope the New years is full of wonderful things for us all

May Santa bring you what your heart most desires but Santa does have way of bringing us what we need

Merry Christmas Happy New Year!

I'll second GTC comment THANK YOU Brad

Wa2ise
yep not white here mate just sand heat and flies....its a wonder Santa hasn't lost some weight, that suit must be like a sauna when he flies around this place


Cheers All ...... got to run again

Add my thanks to Brad and best wishes for Christmas to everyone.

Five sleeps to go.

Thanks Brad for the mention and also for providing the website. I'm working on more content for next year and I'm looking forward to the new image posting feature.

I'd just like to give a big thank you to Brad for providing this most unique Australian Vintage Radio site. I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to contribute to it.

All the best to everyone over the festive season and hopefully we can have some more fun in the new year!

MTV

Hi all,

Thanks Brad ..... and a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all .....

Cheers,
Ian

I got my best pressie in years this week. Today I started a new job. The last one went for over seven years so it was time for a change.

Now I just have to win Lotto on the 3rd January ($30m) and 2015 will start with a bang!

Just received my January issue of Silicon Chip magazine. Hare & Forbes have made a huge blunder with their ad on the back cover which states "Happy New Year 2014". You'd think that somebody in the publishing cycle would have spotted that before it went to press.

May be a large bang before New Year here. Feral is in love with the Apricots.

Marc

You'd think that somebody in the publishing cycle would have spotted that before it went to press.

I doubt anyone bothers with proof-readers these days. One look at our newspapers and their websites and you'll see some of the most disgraceful errors with regard to spelling and grammar. When I went to school I was told that reading newspapers would assist with English skills. This is something no self-respecting teacher would never offer their pupils these days.

Most publications can't even grasp the gentle art of expressing the date correctly. Also, when watching the telly at the times they bring up the card reminding us of the night's programming they express the times in dot notation instead of using colons.