On Tue, 7 Jul 2020 07:39:18 +1000, "David Jaques-Watson"
<xxxxxx@pcug.org.au> wrote:

>Dear Folks –
>
>Tim wrote to Jeff:
>>100 issues.  Wow!
>>Congratulations and well done.
>> Thank you and all the best for the next 100 issues!
>
>+1 from me. Thank you for all the effort you've put into this jewell in the
>Traveller universe. (See what I did there?)  ;-)
>
>Brilliant work, and congrats on the milestone.

Thank you - and thank you to everyone who has chimed in!

When I started Freelance Traveller as a badly-designed (actually, in
retrospect, that initial design wasn't merely bad, it was outright
dreadful) website in the mid-1990s, I envisioned it as a place where fans
could get their stuff out in public. Over time, I learned a bit more about
website design, and in about 1996 and again in 1998, I redesigned the site.
The 1998 redesign was essentially today's design, modulo the occasional
tweaking.

I don't know whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship, or whether
I changed my attitude to the site and presenting it as a community resource
at the time, or whether it was simply right around then that I started
owning and using the domain name 'freelancetraveller.com' (prior to that,
it had been bouncing around the various free hosts, with URLs like
"neotown.net/freetrav") but the 1996 redesign also really was when it "took
off" and gained the notice of the Community. I was able to post updates on
a more-or-less regular schedule, and people started _offering_ material,
rather than my just getting stuff off the TML or other websites and
_asking_ for reprint permission. That also gave me the opportunity to learn
a little bit about what an editor (not just a copy-editor) and curator
does, and that let me work with the community to (hopefully) improve the
quality of what they would find when they visited Freelance Traveller.

Over time, I adopted a goal: To emulate, as much as my small efforts could,
the quality of The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society. Honestly, that
was probably always in the back of my mind, from the get-go, in the very
name of the site - "Freelance Traveller" _does_ sound like the kind of
thing you might see on the masthead of a magazine.

The 1996 redesign was also when I adopted the "slogan" "The Electronic
Fan-Supported Traveller Resource". I had _always_ envisioned it this way,
but now I felt it was important to emphasize the Fan Support component of
it, because to me, that _was_ the MOST important thing about Freelance
Traveller. Too many fansites out there are about egoboo for the fan that
created them; I felt that it was more important to recognize and "talk up"
the people that were actually TAKING THE TIME TO PUT THEIR IDEAS DOWN ON
'PAPER' AND SHARE. You talk about authors and their books, or movies and
their directors, not bookstores and theaters.  Well, to me, it was the same
idea - you talk about Scott Diamond and Benedikt Schwarz and their animals,
or Michael Brown and his adventures, or Timothy Collinson and his reports
from TravCon in the UK, or ... It's just incidental that you can find them
all at that web site - what's it called? Oh, right, "Freelance Traveller".

I still feel that way. Freelance Traveller is not about me, or about
itself, it's about the community, and those who take the time to share
their work.

I was (and still am!) still learning, even if it was (is!) in a
more-or-less disorganized and piecemeal way, about editing, curating, and
publishing. In late 2009, something gelled, or the pieces came together in
just the right way, and I decided to try an experiment. Instead of just
putting up the articles as I had been doing, I put together eight pages of
material, slapped an Andrew Boulton picture on the front, added some design
elements, and... asked the community what they thought about the idea of
Freelance Traveller as a _magazine_, not just a regularly-updated website.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. I have no idea whether it was
because there _were_ no Traveller magazines at the time, because people
liked the idea of getting a variety of new stuff in one convenient package
rather than searching around the site, because it looked good, or what -
but there it was. In my first "From the Editor" in that issue, it was
pretty clear that I had already mentally committed to continuing to publish
as a magazine, but even so, I never thought it would last even five years -
not even the "pro" Traveller magazines made it that long, for the most
part. More, I was working to a _monthly_ schedule, when even the pros had
only come out quarterly.

Nevertheless... There. It. Was. I was getting the support from the
community, and I was generally meeting that monthly deadline. And you were
dowloading it and reading it. And it lasted twenty-five issues, more than
two years. And then it lasted fifty issues. And then it lasted five years.
Twenty-eight pages of content _each_ _month_. Occasionally, I'd have to
miss a month for Reasons, but I'd always give you a double issue the next.

And then I had to admit that I was really trying to do a little too much -
not really because of the _amount_ of work, but because of the _time_ it
was taking. So, I switched to bimonthly publication in 2016. But I didn't
want to disappoint you, so I kept to the same _amount_ of material - the
size of each issue went from twenty-eight pages to sixty. But with the
additional time between issues I Could Do This. And you supported the
change, and continued to support the magazine. And then, before I quite
realized it, it was the end of 2019, and I had just completed _ten_ _years_
of publication, barring one issue - and that was under extreme
circumstances, and I got more support from the Community at that time than
I could have imagined.

Now issue 100 has come out - another milestone I never quite consciously
thought about. It's definitely significant, and a good time for a
retrospective like this.  But there's a more important number that you need
to be aware of: As of right now, _before_ I've added issue 100's articles
to the website, there are _still_ just shy of 2000 articles on the website,
dating back all the way to that first dreadful design. This issue will put
it over _that_ milestone. Many - most - of those articles are, if printed,
_over_ a page of text (or the equivalent in pictures). That, more than
anything else, tells you what the Traveller _community_ has done, and
that's just to make _Freelance Traveller_ the success that you keep telling
me it is. When you add in all the fan sites and forums and file folders and
boxes of index cards and ... with Traveller material that's _not_ in
Freelance Traveller, ... well, let's just say that reports of Traveller's
demise are premature.

You've been thanking me for Freelance Traveller, every issue. _I_ thank
_you_ for the support that has made it possible to produce those issues. I
ask only that you keep it up, so that _together_ we can keep Freelance
Traveller going into the future.



®Traveller is a registered trademark of
Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2020. Use of
the trademark in this notice and in the
referenced materials is not intended to
infringe or devalue the trademark.

--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource
xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com
http://www.freelancetraveller.com

Freelance Traveller extends its thanks to the following
enterprises for hosting services:

onCloud/CyberWeb Enterprises (http://www.oncloud.io)
The Traveller Downport (http://www.downport.com)
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