In January 1998 I started displaying the ValueClick banners which you can still see on ANN nowadays. A minor addition to ANN was to provide a link to an author profile, a service offered by Dejanews. February only saw few updates. Nevertheless, with an average of 300 visitors per day, there was a 50% growth compared to January.

In March, I added a third mirror (the Israel mirror maintained by Meni Berman) and did a minor layout change. On the 1st of April, ANN finally moved over to its current domain, ann.lu.

In late May, ANN returns from a 30 day break due to school exams. Consequently, May was the only month in ANN's existance when the number of visitors went down, not up. In early June, I implemented the direct predecessor of the current layout, which for the first time included a "boxed" look. The layout was refined later that month. During June, I recorded over 14.000 graphical visits.

Nothing worthwhile happened in July, but in early August, a major incident occured and as a result I decided to take ANN offline. I reconsidered things though, and went online again a day later.

In September ANN recorded, for the first time in its existance, more than 1000 visitors on one day. The "vote for me at the Luxembourgish Web awards" campaign starts. October sees the last layout update so far. ANN should now display almost pixel-perfect on the latest versions of IBrowse, Voyager and IProbe, as well as on Netscape Navigator and MSIE. In late october, I had to announce that after 7 months of flawless operation, Meni Berman has decided to shut the IL mirror down.

On the 26th of November, I add a new UK mirror (thanks to Paul Freeman) and win in the personal category of the Luxembourgish Web Awards. Thanks again to everybody who voted for me! In early December, I added an experimental forum (yweb.net/ann). Later that month, I had to announce that Paul Morabito had decided to shut down the AU mirror, after maintaining it for more than one and a half year (many thanks for supporting ANN right from the start, Paul!)

It's impossible for me to make long-term predictions about ANN. I'd like to see ANN celebrate its third birthday, but there may be unexpected things happening sooner or later that might prevent this. My school exams will be in May/June, and I don't have any idea what the second part of this year will look like.

However, it is very probable that ANN will stay until July 1998 at least. Anyway, I'm currently thinking about concepts that would make ANN more open to contributors, but it's still too early to give detailed information about that.

ANN isn't just the product of an ASCII editor - it heavily relies on a custom program written in C and is full of macros that get transformed into HTML code when compiled.

To offer you a small insight into the work behind ANN, here are some details and examples:

Here's a short example of how an article looks when I'm entering it in CygnusEd:

<ANN_1>Lazarus shut down <ANN_3>Apparently, the IDSA have shut down Lazarus. <ANN_4><$exec COMMAND=("ArticleParse articles/981224a.txt") INCLUDE> No <ANN_5>

Here's the same article after it has been compiled:

<TABLE CELLSPACING="1" CELLPADDING="0" BORDER="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD BGCOLOR="black"> <B><FONT COLOR="white" SIZE="4">&nbsp;Lazarus shut down </FONT></B><BR> <TABLE CELLSPACING="1" CELLPADDING="2" BORDER="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD BGCOLOR="white">Apparently, the IDSA have shut down Lazarus. </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD BGCOLOR="#CCCCCC"> <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"><TR BGCOLOR="#CCCCCC"><TD><FONT SIZE="2"><B>From:</B></FONT></TD><TD><FONT SIZE="2"><A HREF="mailto:scooby.doo@nutcase.motel">Scooby Doo</A> (<A HREF="http://x2.dejanews.com/profile.xp?author=scooby.doo@nutcase.motel&ST=QS" TARGET="Articles">Profile</A>)</FONT></TD><TD><FONT SIZE="2"><B>Date</B>:</FONT></TD><TD><FONT SIZE="2">24 Dec 98 00:12:53</FONT></TD></TR><TR BGCOLOR="#CCCCCC"><TD><FONT SIZE="2"><B>Newsgroup:</B></FONT></TD><TD><FONT SIZE="2"><A HREF="news:36818705.MD-1.0a.scooby.doo@nutcase.motel" TARGET="Articles">comp.sys.amiga.misc</A> [<A HREF="articles/981224a.txt" TARGET="Articles">Local</A> | <A HREF="http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate?urltext=http://www.ann.lu/articles/981224a.html" TARGET="Articles">Translate</A>]&nbsp;</FONT></TD><TD><FONT SIZE="2"><B>Confirmed:</B></FONT></TD><TD><FONT SIZE="2"> No </FONT> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> &nbsp;<BR>

This example shows how an external program (I called it "ArticleParse") can retrieve all relevant author information from an article; and it shows what "hsc" (available on Aminet) can do to make your HTML source much more readable. Most layout changes I did were quite simple to implement, since I only had to do changes in my heavily customised hsc.prefs file, not in each article.

After entering all information for a given day, I fire up my "ANN manager" - a custom programm with a MUI interface written in C. It combines an intuitive interface with calls to executables (run hsc and copy files via FTPMount) and rexx programs (to access YAM, for example)