Christmas is nearly upon us and it's time to reflect on the last twelve months once again, and to wish all our visitors, whether regular or new, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We hope you enjoy the site and will want to continue returning in the future.

Despite the site's growing popularity, 2002 didn't start as well as 2001 ended. Early in the year we experienced serious difficulties with the quality of service provided by our web host in the USA and in February the whole site was lost. The main web site was easily restored but unfortunately the forum and discussion board and classified ads were unrecoverable. Although it was a difficult time, looking back, it was not without its benefits. Our frustration with our unresponsive host and our search for an alternative led us to discover Hosting4u, the friendliest and most helpful web hosting provider we could have wished for. We are very grateful for the help Steve, Alastair and the rest of the crew at Hosting4u gave us during the difficult time of transferring the site, and the support they continue to give us. We would recommend their services to anyone.

We now have an excellent new Forum & Notice Board, which is just as disappointingly underused as the old one was. The Classified Ads have also been reinstated and if you want to become a millionaire overnight whilst working from home - this is the place to look!

We've continued our efforts to add to and improve the content of the site and in addition to the regular updates and changes needed to keep the site current, we've had a couple of excellent new features contributed by local people. Railways of Marple and District from 1794, by Warwick and Monty Burton, is the definitive history of local railways and we were delighted to be given permission to reproduce it on-line. We've also had contributions from Ian Rice, whose journal of the Marple Remembers Battle Fields Tour of the Somme in April and his more condensed version for the Community News article in November were most welcome additions. We hope to include more contributions from Ian and other local people in 2003.

The Community pages have been joined by Marple Karate Club, the New Mills, Marple and District Rotary Club, the Hare & Hounds Classic Vehicle Club and the Ridge Methodist Church. Another special addition to the Marple on-line community has been All Saints' School Centenary pages, with a celebration of their 100th year on the present site and 171 years of continuous teaching. If your local organisation would like to join the Community pages free of charge, just get in touch with us.

The hit counter has recorded approximately 28,000 hits since this time last year, a steady growth on last year's figures and a trend we hope to sustain by making the site even more interesting during next year. Once again, we have several major new features planned which should help to do this and it would be great to break the 100,000 barrier by Christmas 2003!

For the latest news on the Iron Bridge Restoration Campaign you can visit the On-Line Diary, however, we must extend our thanks here to Marple's Area Committee, Marple Carnival Committee, Marple's Artists, especially Malcolm Melia, Helen Winterson's of Market Street and the Ring o' Bells for hosting our monthly fun quiz to raise funds for the campaign. With 2,000 signatures on the petition, and 122 letters of support, we know that the local community is behind us on this issue and we hope we'll be able to build on the progress made so far during next year.

We can't look back over 2002 without mentioning our articles in the Community News. We thought we'd overcome the difficulties being experienced this time last year, and we'd been much happier with the way our articles were presented in the paper since then. Until November, that is, when the web site name and address was omitted from the credits. We made it clear that this wasn't acceptable to us but, despite written assurances, the omission was repeated again in December. As a result we've decided that this was our final contribution to the paper. After a great run, lasting over two years, we'll now have to find a new outlet for our "creative" juices. Despite these recent difficulties, we thank the Community News for giving us the opportunity to bring the web site name and our interest in local history to a wider audience, beyond the reach of just the Internet. We were contacted by many local people with interesting stories to tell or with photographs and other articles to show us. It was great fun while it lasted.

To end on a positive note, the web site is now virtually self-supporting thanks to the small amount of advertising included and the web sites we've constructed for local businesses. We thank them for their support and wish everyone who visits the site the best Christmas possible.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.