After being busy for a really long time, I finally managed to put some time aside to tweak the page. Now you can see the site's statistics and use a form to communicate with me.

My friend, José Carrasco, told me recently that he had been in contact with someone from Ponte de Sor on the Internet. I tried to establish contact right away, of course. At least I wanted to inform this pontessorense of the existence of our humble site. I later found out that this pontessorense doesn't even reside in Ponte de Sor anymore, and hasn't for quite a few years now. He did, however, offer right away to send a few images for us to display. Shortly thereafter I received the aforementioned images and there is a chance that more will come our way. Thank you Fernando Salgado for your contribution.

In the past few days I received another message from a lady who lives in Lisbon but has roots in Ponte de Sor. This lady visits the Tombo Tower (a monument that holds most of Portugal's historical documentation) with some frequency in her professional capacity. Since she has come across references to Ponte de Sor in some of the documents researched in the past, our site's newest friend has offered to send some of that information this way. Thanks go out to her as well for her interest and generosity.

This site is four months away from its first anniversary. After all these months there has been only one contribution from a pontessorense. I'm certain there is a lot more to show, tell and remember about our city. Contributions by pontessorenses are eagerly awaited from now on.

The Portuguese part of the site was completed on sunday, Dec. 19, from then on I have been translating and incorporating the search utility into several pages among other minor, albeit time consuming, modifications.

Contrary to what some may have thought I have kept on working on the site all along, although progress was slow and hard at first. Here is the new look, I hope you like it and also that you let me know if there is anything at all that doesn't work properly so it can be fixed ASAP.

Unfortunately I had to postpone finishing certain areas of the site in order not to delay the launch any further. I expect to add the remaining and fine tune what there is as an ongoing process from now on.
Due to the inclusion of the new internal search service I had to remove the stats collector codes from the page because I think they conflicted. It was worth it! As you may see, the internal search now works 100% and I take this opportunity to inform you that I am working on the results page to make it match the rest of the site's look.

During the roughly 2 months that the stats collecting service was gathering data there were about 1200 hits to the various pages on the site by 650 - 700 users. The service didn't work 100% of the time, so there were gaps here and there. Believe it or not, this humble page has had visitors from France, Canada (besides myself and my friends), the Netherlands and Belgium, in addition to the countless hits from Portugal, and possibly other countries that weren't detected because they used Altavista's translating service. I don't know how they got here or what they were actually looking for, but I hope they found it.

I'm grateful for the support and comments the site has enjoyed and I hope that you keep the feedback flowing so it can keep growing and improving.

During the previous week I have worked a bit every day on the site. The individual Op pages were introduced as a complement to the Op index page, while the index page itself had the code altered to force it to show the "Wanted" cell background in Netscape as intended.
Next I hope to add a short introduction for each of the Ops and, if I still have it in me, I'll get started on Ponte@Net, which has been overlooked since it was introduced.
If you feel that your interest in today's update hasn't waned, please keep reading. This was an active week regarding the site and my analysis of it.

A further modification was the addition of a stats colector to every page insyead of only at the entrance. The reasoning behind this change is that the entrance's stats confirmed what I believed: the site was visited by quite a few people until now. In the week (not even a week) that the stats have been collected I see that there were a lot of visitors, but the vast majority shyed away from identifying themselves or otherwise commenting or participating. As I suspected, the lack of guestbook entries wasn't telling the whole story.

I've been promoting the site on IRC since its inception. This week I went ahead and promoted it on USENET as well. We shall see if the results reflect that approach.
I also requested on IRC that the site be promoted among the local and specialty media.
Another piece of the puzzle that I'm missing - but I don't have the resources to deal with it...I really need assistance on this one - is Ponte de Sor's history. I need something to make available to visitors. Two people have asked me about it. If two people noticed it and went so far as to voice their opinion, given the movement the page has been experiencing and the lack of feedback, I think several others have noticed the gap. Numeno said he would gather the information for me, but any and all help is welcome.
I would like to establish some form of contact with local organisms, such as teh City Hall and the library. Ifyou or anyone you know is willing to help you know what to do: ponte_de_sor@hotmail.com
I wish I had a medal to award you for reading this far. Thank you for your visit. I hope I can count on your support.

Working "in the dark" is pretty hard, so I enlisted a stats service to help me make some sense of how many people are accessing the site from where. It also serves the purpose of collecting other types of data such as the operating system used, the screen resolution, the browser and version, Java compatibility, etc., so I can better gauge how to change the site's design, among other things.

The wanted flyers have been posted and the IRC channel rules (Version 1.0 Beta) are available as well. The next step will be to accentuate the words in this page and the rules page. When that is done I'll move on to the Ponte@Net page.

New image added to the homepage. New images added to the "Ponte, old and new" section" as well.

I believe that the new homepage animated gif looks better than the old static one and alerts visitors to the available services right away. Too bad that the file became a bit bloated, but you only need to load it fully once and then it's stored in your cache.

Other additions to be implemented in the near future include: pictures of channel operators and more Ponte@Net links.

Here is the message received from SAPO (a portuguese portal/search/directory):

"Cheers,

Your link was recently added to SAPO's database in the Regional /Cidades, Vilas e Aldeias/P directory.

Hugs from SAPO, Isabel Oliveira Dias."

Ponte@Net is our way of putting forth links to pages related to the city or its inhabitants as well as other links to useful or interesting information. Every effort will be made to update this page as often as possible. Suggestions are always welcome.