We are ten

We are following the lead provided by the then Maine On2 Yahoo group on their 10th Anniversary back in October 2009, when they used the same picture showing Bill Kerr’s Car Works SR&RL #23 winding its way through the scenery of his layout approaching Avon Roadway.

This WordPress iteration of the Maine On2 FAQ’s made it’s public debut 10 years ago on the 30^th March 2013.

It is a successor to and a development from two previous complementary versions; the publicly accessible text based HTML web version of Bill Kerr’s own collection of research notes first published in 2003 on his own site at his own expense: and the picture based Fotopic version showing pictures and having some text started in 2005.

Both of these versions were lost in the 2010 to 2011 timeframe.

We (Bill Kerr, Trevor Marshall, Herb “Matt” Mathews and Terry Smith) had been discussing republishing the older versions of the FAQ’s from the Summer of 2012 onwards, with particular emphasis on the text based HTML version.

In February 2013 we started loading up information in WordPress on a trial basis. After about four weeks, we were satisfied with both the formats chosen and styles developed, and when several discussions on the Maine On2 Yahoo! group made reference to the old FAQ’s, we decided to go public with the new version to support those threads.

We started back then with just 41 topics/posts, mostly picture based, showing some of the commercially produced brass models and a selection of historic On2 layouts.

Encouraged by the response from the group, the number of topics grew to over 110 by our first anniversary in 2014, on our fifth anniversary the blog consisted of 195 topics/posts and 6 pages. In our fifth year, we passed a major milestone, that of receiving our 100 000th viewing.

Today, on our 10^th Anniversary the blog consists of 222 topics/posts and 6 public pages. In the ten years that it has been available for public viewing, more than 54000 viewers from 114 countries have viewed more than 180000 pages/topics.

Thanks to all our contributors and viewers, we hope that you have enjoyed the last 10 years, and look forward to the next 10……

Terry, Matt and Trevor.

30^th March 2023.