August turned out to be a interesting but frustrating month. Interesting because the number of visitors to Adran is continuing to rise, so more comments and suggestions are coming in than ever before. But sadly, frustrating, because I have not been able to spend and much time working on the station as I would like. There have been some great suggestions from upgrades and improvements sent in, but I am literally stretched to the limit at the moment - there is no more free time I can devote to Adran without having to stop essential "real world" tasks like sleeping and working!

On the plus side, we had a rather productive month, a total of 26 updates were implemented last month and 30 news stories were posted at Scoop. The LCARS titles and animated link bar replacement projects are all but complete. We are undertaking a station wide sweep over the next couple of weeks to note any pages that have not been upgraded and schedule any remedial work. Over half of the station has been checked so far, and only two pages found that still require upgrading.

As much as I hate to say it, I've received several more messages from visitors concerned that Adran is moving towards becoming a News only site. The possible removal of Hypertext, Scriptorium and Utilities has been suggested as further evidence that we are planning to do just that. I will keep saying this until the cows come home - Adran is never going to be just a news site. Our focus has always been to offer a wide selection of Star Trek and Sci-Fi material across a broad spectrum of areas. This is not likely to change, as myself and the rest of the people who contribute to Adran firmly believe that our corner of the internet offers a unique range of material to our visitors. One that we enjoy maintaining and you our visitors seem to enjoy reading. Just one more thing to add - there are also absolutely no plans for Adran to adopt a "Blog" design to allow easier remote updates. Where this rumour came from, only the great maker knows...lol....

Going back to Hypertext, Scriptorium and Utilities for a moment. So far, everyone that has taken the time to get in touch so far, has agreed that due to falling usage, that these sections should be retired from Adran. Usage of these sections fell to an all time low last month, and we can no longer justify spending time and effort updating these sections. Our time would be better spent updating areas of the station that are being frequently used. I have laid out some ground work on what we are going to have to do to complete the removal of these sections, and it's not going to be complicated. The work is going to be completed in one reorganisation, that is currently slated for the last week in September. It should be noted that there are no further sections of Adran under threat of removal due to low visitor usage.

A couple of updates didn't get published this month. The planned third update for Databank was pushed back as we could not squeeze it in, and the planned update for Triviality had to be pushed back to technical issues. Both of these updates have been put to the top of the list for this month. We have decided though, that rather than try and squeeze in three updates to Databank this month - something we did not manage to achieve last month - there will be only two updates this month. One of those updates, will see the addition of the first 13 episodes of TNG Season Three. Following several requests from visitors for more Episodes Entries to be added to Databank, we are re-focusing our update plans and are going to add at half a seasons worth of Episode Entries to Databank every month from this point onwards.

Several obstacles were thrown in our path for the planned update of Triviality - the most serious of these was the file was uploaded for testing and found to be corrupt. The master copy we had on file was also corrupt, the back up file was in the same condition and when Sean e-mailed me his copy - that was also corrupt. I am at a complete loss to explain how this file came to be so badly corrupted, but time and effort has been spent re-building it from the various draft versions we have on file off line. It's looking good, and we hope to have it back together and looking actually better than it did before by the end of next week.

Looking forward to the next couple of months, we again are going to target those areas of the station that have not been updated in some time. Onscreen, Visual and Animate have all been moved up the list, and we are actively looking for new material for these sections. So, if you have any Star Trek screen savers, desk top images or animated GIF's please that you think should be added to our collection, please send them in.

It's all systems go for another really busy month, I'm planning to take some well earned shore leave in the next couple of weeks, but Sean is taking the centre seat for a few days in my stead. I know I'm leaving you in good hands, just go gentle with him guys - he's got a lot on his plate at the moment and he's doing me a big favour in taking over!

Peace and Long Life