After eight years on-line it's now become a bit of a 'tradition' at Christmas to look back on what we've achieved during the last twelve months and also to look forward to the approaching New Year. 2006 has been another year for changes, several of them unexpected and some of them significant (to us anyway!)

At the end of 2005, after four years of exceptional service, we began to experience difficulties with Jigsaw Hosting, the small company that used to host the Marple Website for us. They always were a small 'one-man-band' type of outfit and due to domestic changes they were struggling to give us the support we had grown accustomed to. Early in 2006 we took matters into our own hands and decided to set up our own web hosting capability. This was time consuming and took us up a steep learning curve but in April 2006 we completed a move to our own server where now, as well as hosting the Marple Website, we are able to host our small but growing portfolio of web sites that we've designed for a variety of customers. One of the most successful and important of these being that of the Marple Business Forum.

We managed to keep things running fairly normally while all this was going on and 2006 was a good year for the Community Pages, which were joined by Marple Red Cross, Ludworth and Mellor Women's Institute, Marple Afternoon Townswomen's Guild, Marple Gang Show, Marple Branch of the National Women's Register, Marple Lock Heritage Society, Marple Photographic Society, Marple Freemasons at Doric Lodge and the RSPB High Peak Group, who meet in the Senior Citizens' Hall in Marple Memorial Park.

Talking of Memorial Park, our association with the Friends of the Park has continued throughout the year and, although Peter is stepping down as Chairman due to new commitments (more of that later), we've seen a number of long running projects through to completion. These included the Jim Heald Memorial Bench, which was finally installed in April 2006 and the Coronation Bench designed and constructed by Wayne Chaisty of Ironwood, and funded by a Stockport Council grant. We're particularly pleased at how well this has turned out, which is largely due to Wayne's skills. Incidentally, we love his nativity figures in Market Street this Christmas and hope to see lots more of his work in the community in the future.

Still in Memorial Park, we've also helped to design two new interpretation boards, the first of which is about the dedication of the park and the War Memorial. This has recently been installed next to the new flag pole near the memorial. The second, about Marple Locks and the canal, has now been delivered and will be installed alongside the path at the entrance to the park opposite Oldknow's Warehouse in the near future. The photographs on both boards are particularly good! The Friends have also submitted a grant application to the BBC's Breathing Places campaign to make improvements to the woodland behind the library, and should learn if this is successful in May next year.

Talking of good photographs, the old master may have moved on but he won't let us forget how good he is and we were delighted to add a new David Brindley Gallery with some stunning images of Cyprus, where he now lives. David loves a good laugh and he certainly did that when we sucked so many of you in with our April Fools Day scam about Dan Bank being closed. Trouble is it looks like it's going to come true, so the last laugh may be on us!

Somebody was certainly laughing at us last year when we thought we may see the restoration work on the Iron Bridge start this year. As we explain in more detail in the Iron Bridge Project Diary, our hopes of submitting an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund shortly after we completed the Project Planning Phase in March 2006 were dashed when we learnt that our submission had to be prioritised with others across Stockport and also that it was far more likely to be successful if we could develop the community involvement aspects of the project, rather than simply the restoration of the bridge itself.

We've had a fantastic response from the organisations we asked for help and support with the community aspects and once the application is submitted we'll do a big update of the diary with all the details and say thank you to everyone properly. Work on the application has been pretty intensive since the middle of the year and particularly the last few weeks as we get ready to submit it in January 2007. There has not been a lot of time for much else and once again keeping the web site updated has had to take a back seat to the bridge.

We should learn of the HLF's decision on whether to award us a grant in June 2007 and of course we are hopeful that the work will start soon after, although we've learnt the hard way to not to take anything for granted! Between January and June we will probably have to answer loads of questions on our application from the HLF, so any hopes that we can focus on something else for a while may be short-lived.

As many of you will know, Peter has gone from semi-retirement, with loads of time on his hands to pursue his community interests, to being full time landlord of the Ring o' Bells. He and Sue seem to be making a great success of this and the pub has been transformed since they took over. With Ron the Chef now firmly ensconced, a fresh new look with more interesting furniture and themes based on local history and the canals and waterways, it looks set to get even busier. It's certainly worth calling in over Christmas to see the Santa's Grotto decorations and, of course, the Liberal Club sign that we rescued last year!

Peter's new workload and the demands of the Iron Bridge Project have meant that we have struggled to keep on top of our Marple Promotions activities this year and those of you used to seeing us at all the school fairs and events around Christmas time may have noticed our absence. Unfortunately there is simply not enough time to do everything, however, our 2007 Marple and Mellor Calendar (our best yet) and our cards are still on sale in local shops and at the Ring o' Bells. We hope that you will continue to buy them to help us pay for the web site and so that we can continue to do the things we feel we should, like purchasing the banner to welcome home swimmer Matt Walker after his success at the Commonwealth Games this year. So if the shops don't have any left, please ask!

Despite the workload I've just been complaining about we did still manage to do our usual Marple Carnival update for 2006, support the Romiley Young Farmers' Show, the Firkin Challenge and the Charles Ingham Band Fund and get involved with Stockport Council and Marple Locks Heritage Society in the locks display at the Tatton Show. So we didn't do so bad.

One area of the web site we've always been proud of is the Virtual Tour, with our huge public collection of photographs of bygone Marple that we are able to share with everyone. It was becoming increasingly difficult to incorporate new photographs seamlessly into the existing galleries and we had been wondering how to deal with this for some time. The move to our own server gave us the opportunity for greater software flexibility and far more web space, which has enabled us to carry out a major upgrade to the 'Tour'. This was completed in August 2006 and we are delighted to say that it has gone from strength to strength and we are extremely pleased with the results. In just four months we have managed to add nearly 300 new photographs and the images in the galleries have been viewed 43,000 times already. We must thank everyone who has shared their pictures with us and if you have any that are not already featured, then please do get in touch with us so we can continue to expand this exciting local resource.

We were saddened to learn of the death, just a couple of days before Christmas, of a major contributor to the Virtual Tour and a gentleman whose support we are very proud to have received. Gordon Mills passed away on Saturday afternoon following a stroke earlier in the week and our thoughts are with his family and friends at this difficult time. Gordon's guided walks are still a major feature on the site and his generosity in allowing us to reproduce them so early in its development was a factor key to its success. Gordon leaves a huge hole in the Marple Local History scene that it will be impossible to fill. His 'Changing Faces' presentations and videos and his photography have given us so much inspiration and his fund raising efforts on behalf of the British Heart Foundation have been truly admirable. His passing is a great loss to his family and also to Marple, which he has supported and promoted so well for so many years.

If there are any negatives this year, then the overwhelming one has to be SPAM! Not just SPAM in e-mail, which is reaching horrendous proportions, but spammers trying to use the web site's popularity to advertise prescription drugs and much worse. The guest book, which used to inspire us with mostly appreciative comments, has had to be shut down until we can install a spam-proof version because it was being bombarded with hundreds of spoof messages trying to insert addresses of web sites selling extremely dubious wares. The Forum and Noticeboard has suffered similar problems. Earlier this year the settings had to be changed so that unregistered visitors cannot post due to these people. Since then they have been attempting to register in their dozens every day. They are relentless and it seems to make no difference that not a single one of them has been successful in posting one of their messages on the board. It is extremely depressing that the majority of maintenance now comprises removing these muppets, rather than reviewing new posts. The daily ratio of fake registrations to genuine posts is around 100:1, so this is a plea for all you genuine users out there to please use it more.

To finish on a much more positive note, our growth in visitors has continued upwards and this year has seem the hit counter notch up a record of more than 48,000 visits to the main site. We crashed through the 200,000 barrier earlier this year and we are well on schedule to reach a quarter of a million hits in 2007. We look forward to trying to keep everyone coming back for more throughout 2007 and, yes, we know the pub  guide's horrendously out of date but Iron Bridge permitting we'll find a way to get it sorted!