So where have the last 12 months gone to? This is now the site's sixth Christmas on-line and once again it's time to look back over the year and highlight what we've managed to achieve. This year will be memorable for many things but especially there never being enough time to do everything we'd planned. However, despite being overwhelmed by domestic events that included a family wedding, a 25th anniversary, 50th birthday celebrations and, sadly, a family funeral, we still seem to have packed in a fair amount. 

As we emphasised in our update last year, we've moved away from simply 'being a web site' to become more involved in projects in the real world - or real Marple anyway! This trend has certainly continued throughout 2004, perhaps in some ways to the detriment of the quality and regularity of updates of the site itself, which is something we'll be trying to address in 2005 - how to keep more balls in the air! Having said that, a trawl back through the year's achievements show that we've much to be proud of and the real world and Internet have often overlapped.

This is particularly true in the case of Friends of Marple Memorial Park, whose web site we created and host as well as being on the committee and heavily involved in the group's activities. These have included a well attended task day, publication of a newsletter delivered through most of central Marple's letterboxes, restoration of the stocks, a Green Flag Award and a substantial grant towards the cost of a new children's play area in the park. More recently we've also been involved in an appeal on behalf of the Friends to raise money for a bench as a memorial to Jim Heald, who died this year after working and being involved in the park for an amazing 45 years.

Another area with even greater overlap has been the ongoing Iron Bridge Restoration Project. For our sponsored walk in May we invested heavily in new equipment that would allow us to update the web site on the move from any location. This worked extremely well and our daily diary of the walk must be one of the web highlights of the year. The publication of the web diary led to our appearance on Community Channel TV - a brief 5 minutes of fame that we also managed to preserve on-line. Although it's been a good year for funding raising and publicity the restoration itself has been a source of great frustration to us since the walk. This was due to a variety of unexpected delays, not least those caused by the difficulty of finding solutions acceptable to all parties who seem to have developed an interest in the bridge in recent times. We're pleased to report that the year has ended on a positive note and, thanks to clear guidance from English Heritage, we appear very close to a final scheme. We hope to provide firm details early in the new year and look forward to making significant progress throughout 2005.

A project started in 2003 and completed this year was the appeal to purchase a gold watch on behalf of the local community for Trooper Chris Finney GC. This was successfully concluded when the engraved watch was presented to Chris at a private function held in the Navigation pub in May. The informal ceremony was attended by representatives of all the organisations and most of the individuals who contributed to the appeal. Chris has since been given the freedom of Stockport in further recognition of his achievements.

Another successful overlap was our involvement with the organisation of the Marple Locks Bicentenary celebrations in July this year. These were such a success that there is to be a similar event next year on 10th July 2005. This year's event was commemorated on-line with the unveiling of a great new feature on the web site - The Virtual Tour of Marple Locks. As a web site project this has taken nearly 3 years from its conception to getting it on-line and we expect to be improving and enhancing it for several years to come, hopefully in parallel with real improvements to the locks and their environs led by The Marple Locks Heritage Society.  

There are several area of the site that we've not managed to keep up-to-date, although they're 'on the list', as we tell people who enquire. One of these is the 2004 Mellor Open Gardens and another the Romiley Show, both of which were great successes this year. We apologise to the organisers of these events for not finding the time yet - but we'll do our best to catch up in 2005. We did manage to update the Carnival pages and those for Mellor Dig, thank goodness, and look forward to the continuing success of all our local events next year.

Another area of the site long overdue for an update is our gallery of photographs and postcards on our original 'Virtual Tour'. It will be two years in April 2005 since we added any new pictures on this hugely popular part of the site but, hopefully, this is an anniversary we'll be able to avoid!

Things have been fairly static on the Community pages this year with plenty of updates from existing members but no new organisations having joined. We've had quite a few enquiries but none of them have yet got back to us with the information and photographs we need to set things up. Hopefully the New Year will see a new influx, as we'd be only too pleased to provide more free pages for any local non-profit making organisations who would like to join our on-line community. 

This time last year we were hoping to break through the incredible milestone of 100,000 visits and we fittingly achieved that on New Year's Eve. This year the number of hits has grown by more than 39,000, which is 7,000 up on 2003. Dare we hope to get close to 200,000 by this time in 2005? We'll certainly be giving it a go...........