These past two months have been shaping up quite nicely. The new Mac GUI design is progressing steadily, and I hopefully will have it online in June, if not earlier. Perhaps July. We'll see.

For two months straight, Mac GUI has exceeded it bandwidth quota. And even when I applied for an increase at the end of March, we still exceeded it again on the 28th of April! The largest Mac GUI user-hosted site used up 12 GB of bandwidth (this was the site that was on reddit) in April and 13 GB in March.

Mac GUI itself saw nearly double the traffic from March to April. In March we had 14,000 unique visitors. Last month, April, 25,000 unique visitors came to Mac GUI. This traffic is quite substantial considering that Mac GUI is a site for old Apple and Macintosh computers! It's four times the amount of traffic that Mac GUI was getting even just three years ago.

What are the upcoming projects? Well, briefly, the first is to get the A2HQ.com site directory online. This was requested a number of months ago when the service first opened. The main reason that I put off such a relatively simple task was that there really weren't that many sites in existence. Now there are about 45, and I think it's time to start the directory.

The code for this feature should go online this week.

The next project is entirely back-end and that is to change how the search index for the Usenet archives is stored. It is taking up so much space and I believe that is part of why search queries for frequent terms are so slow. I believe that having compressed indices will greatly speed the search execution process.

This project is not too complex, but is more so than the A2HQ site directory.

The final project on the to-do list for Mac GUI is still in the somewhat secret stages because it is still in planning and it will require some substantial server upgrades in terms of disk space storage and bandwidth. It will involve PDFs and documentation.

And there you have it! That's what I hope to accomplish for Mac GUI in the next 6 months or however long.

I've been fortunate with Mac GUI to have enough "clout" I suppose, with the Internet Archive's crawler to get quite a few pages of Mac GUI in the Wayback machine. The crawler can only get to what is popularly linked around the web, and it turns out that many sites are missed.

Chief among these are the many sites hosted on .a2hq.com and .macgui.com subdomains. They're all a part of Mac GUI, but they're not so well-linked.

Therefore, I've been manually browsing around these sites using the new Wayback Machine which promises to add pages browsed from the live web to their archive after some time.

So, to webmasters, if you care about having your site in the Web Archive, which you probably should, it would be in your interest to browse around your site using the Wayback machine at least 2 or 3 times per year. For everyone else, we'll wait and see if the pages get archived.

I'm a bit disappointed by the limitations of the Amazon Kindle ebook format. Some of them are easy to manage: no page numbers, no index, and centered photographs.

Other limitations will require more work, and may mean that I'll have to eliminate content from the ebook edition. The biggest drawback of the Amazon Kindle is that it did not not allow for HTML tables. While my book isn't just full of tables, there are a number of tables which will either have to be eliminated or reformatted.

Fortunately, it looks like the new Kindle Format 8 does add support for tables, so there may be some good news, after all.

In any case, while the ebook won't be ready for this month, it will be ready at some time in the coming weeks.

I just received an unsolicited invitation to join a mailing list the other day.



What?

Well, I took a look and it's called retroquill.net run by Apple II personages Ken Gagne and Dr. Steven Weyhrich.

According to the description that I got after accepting the invitation, the list is for Apple II authors.

This list a private, invitation-only list for published magazine and book authors and prominent bloggers on the subject of retrocomputing, especially the Apple II.

It only started just a few days ago.

Since I may still publish one or two more Apple II books, I'm mildly interested to see what happens.

Well, A2HQ.com officially opened about 25 hours ago, and in that time, there have been about 20 new sites created. I definitely underestimated the interest in WordPress blog hosting! It seems like nearly everyone has activated his blog and intends to start a blog site. I'm definitely looking forward to reading some interesting Apple II blogs.

I've gotten some requests to add more themes, so I'm doing that now. Feel free to request a particular theme that you want.

However, besides WordPress, there is also 200 MB of disk space available via FTP so that anyone can upload HTML pages to make a web site the old fashioned way.

Meanwhile, I'll do my part behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly.