ACD's 2023 was a bit bumpy, to say the least!
In January we lost FBN, the Bud Tender of coffeeshopmenus.org. This was a massive loss to the stonernet. With a lot of help from his family and friends, I was able to resurrect his web site and keep it going.
In March we then lost HullDJ. This fine gentleman was indeed a popular DJ in Hull. He also provided the web hosting for the ACD. That led to more scurrying around and organising paid hosting.
In April the channels.nl forums closed down. Fortunately that didn't involve anyone dying but it did mark the end of an era.
In August I discovered that I wasn't as healthy as I thought I was. You haven't got rid of me yet, though. Up until then I thought age was just a number. Now it's got more real.
On the positive side, we had another great 4/20 Gathering in April and plans are already afoot for the 2024 edition. The ACD is still attracting lots of visitors. Not back to its heyday of around a decade ago, before Google Maps became established as a place to review coffeeshops, but still holding its own. Unfortunately these forums are not flying so high but still hanging on.
The big success story is FBN's coffeeshopmenus.org site, which continues to go from strength to strength. It's overtaken the ACD in terms of visitor numbers, regularly exceeding 5,000 per day, and more people are sending in menu pictures.
I have a busy couple of weeks coming up moving the menus site to a new server before its current contract ends. After that I need to restructure the site so that the older menus are on separate pages to reduce the enormous bandwidth the site consumes.
Happy new year all! Hope to see some of you in April.