Starfleet Jedi

It has now been one year since I started this website; tomorrow will mark the anniversary of the first article drafts being uploaded. I'll take this opportunity to talk about this website for a bit.

My intention at that time was to write 14 pages on each of the 14 header topics - 196 pages. I would start with the individual series and movies, flesh them out, and only once I had fully examined each topic with regard to each piece of each franchise would I write the overall overview. As an anniversary present to you all, I present you with the overall overview.

Some of my critics have claimed that I am astoundingly anti-Wars, and that my site is biased. The truth is that I've been learning as I built this website, and I've kept an open mind. I started off by discarding everything I already thought I knew about Star Trek and Star Wars and going back through each franchise piece by piece.

I've changed my mind about many things as I've gone through this. I never would have thought that Star Wars ships might use hydrocarbons(!) as fuel, even in a very unconventional fashion. I never noticed just how impressive weapons were in TOS before - or how slow Voyager crawled in comparison to the rest of the franchise. I had no idea I would end up using formulae developed to deal with naval artillery to compare impacts on starships from both franchises. It seems pretty far out there at times... but it's all solid scientific analysis. I've had a good time so far, so I'll keep at this.

My concept of the site has altered slightly over time. Now, instead of 196 topical articles, my site map includes 168 topical articles with a total of 203 HTML pages. Right now, there are another 73 articles on the Open Database. The forum has yet to come alive (hey - post!), but I'm sure that will change within a couple weeks. Traffic has been holding steady at ~200 unique visitors to this website for a while now; I've had over 3,000 unique visitors in the whole year, so I know many of you are coming back, even if the average visitor only sees a dozen pages or so.

I hope to see the volume of material on the Open Database and forum pass the volume of material on my main website in this next year as my guests start to contribute more.

Rewriting, rethinking, revising, and reformatting the main article sections will be an on-going project; the main website will probably be updated continually until I find I can no longer afford to spend time on this website.

I've gotten a lot better at reworking this website as time goes on. I started this website knowing next to nothing about HTML and klutzing my way slowly through; I spent many hours just to produce 196 blank pages on Mozilla Composer. I've since learned to do batch and bulk editing on Bluefish. Look for continued growth of this website in the next year!

Congratulations! Here's looking forward to many more years of Starfleet Jedi, and celebrating many anniversaries of this forum, too.
-Mike

Yes, congrads and keep up the good work.

Thank you both.

I intend to keep this around for a good long while. Bandwidth is cheap, and will probably remain cheap for a long time; webhosts are plentiful, and I have offline backups of everything. My traffic would have to increase by a factor of several thousand before I even start worrying about how much it costs to run this site - and that's after the dramatic growth in traffic that's happened since I opened these forums.

The most tricky part is finding the time to keep things updated and run smoothly. If I have enough time to post to the forums, I clearly have enough time to put together updates for the website.

If the forums start sucking up too much time, I may need to appoint some moderators to keep an eye on it for me. I'm hoping that in the next year, the forums grow to a few hundred active members and I can pass things almost entirely off to a capable staff.

That reminds me - if you guys really like this place, tell your friends to come register on the forums. At this point, I'm mostly counting on word of mouth to grow this place.

First, Congratulations! I really hope that you keep this site going; it’s refreshing to read information that’s not biased or full of misinformation.

Second, since it seems that there isn’t a welcome page, I take the opportunity to say hello to everybody. And now to make some posts!

Welcome friend. Are you of the body? Blessings of Landru be with you.

Hi to you to AFT. Welcome to the forum.

Thank you guys. AnonymousRedShirtEnsign, I don’t quite understand what do you mean with your question, would you be kind enough to clarify?

It's a reference to the episode "Return of the Archons" (TOS-1).

Ahh! I haven’t seen that episode in a long time and I doubt I have it on tape. No wonder why I didn’t catch the reference.