"What a looooong strange trip it's been!"

by Dave Phillips
Jan 1999

I generally find that the beginning of a new year makes one reflective...you sit back and take a look at what you've accomplished over the past year and start making plans for how to improve things a step further in the coming months.   I'm no different, and so I'd like to take this opportunity to reflect back on the key events in ECHO STATION over this past year and to give a few "atta-boys!" out to the folks who have helped make it possible. 

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• www.echostation.com itself was born this year.  Sure seems like it HAD to have been longer ago, but we've gone through this amazing period of expansion and growth in just under a year.   We hit the hyperdrive and moved away from the old Simplenet address that just wasn't keeping pace with our needs and really hit the ground running at the beginning of 1998.  This is easily the best move we ever made, and I'm ecstatic that it's worked out so well thus far.

• The new address did so well in fact that we wound up outgrowing any of the web hosting plans that we could find on the 'net with any of the companies out there.  So, biting the bullet, we picked up our own very first dedicated server.  This led to offering up web hosting plans of our own.  Thanks and regards to Ryan over at the Star Wars Database, Romey over at Hydrospanner.com, Echo's own Jim Fisher, Mike over at Lucasfan.com, Star Wars Gamers, The Kessel Run, the guys over at Outer-Rim.net, and all the rest of the Star Wars sites out there that made it possible for us to branch out into yet another avenue of helping out Star Wars fans on the 'net all over the world...by giving them a home.

• In that same vein, our "affilated" sites came on board and started a whole new level of ways we bring information to you, our readers.   We opened up a number of third level domains to accommodate the needs of Pablo Hidalgo's STAR WARS Index, Steve's STAR WARS Timeline, The Unofficial Books & Novels Page, The Kalidor Squadron, and several others.

• Amazingly enough, information about ECHO STATION's hosting plans travelled outside the STAR WARS community, and we soon had businesses showing up in our inbox looking for a home for their sites as well, and thus was NovaTech Web Services born.  Do remember to stop by there if you're looking for a new home for your website.

• Gini McDonagh stepped in and offered up an incredible amount of her time as Editor of our beloved EMag after our former Editor moved on to pursue other interests and sites around the web.   I can't say enough about how much she's helped out over the past months...so I'm not even going to bother trying beyond "thanks". 

• Ann McMeekin has helped out immensely behind the scenes on the ongoing project of Echo's look and feel, as well as working on Main Terminal and several other features.   She's also whacked me back into line a few times as I get out of hand...which happens just as often as you'd think it does <g>.

• Our Staff and Contributors have kept the flow of articles, news, reviews and information coming into our site, and we quite simply couldn't do it without them.

• ...and you, our visitors and readers.  Without you, this site would be a pointless cobweb standing still on the internet with absolutely no reason to exist.  I think of this site as being just as much yours as it is ours, so please keep those feedback comments coming to help us make this everything you want it to be in the future!

As we've turned the corner into 1999, we've already got some exciting new things in the works.  Partnerships with some of the best and brightest of the internet today are going to be featured in the coming weeks, as well as new sections, features, and ways for the site to be more in line with the overall vision and purpose behind it.  

Oh yeah...and there's this minor detail about a movie coming out sometime in the spring...you might have heard something about it by now <g>. 

What a great time to be a STAR WARS fan.  I'm excited to be a part of the internet community in general, and Echo Station specifically as we move towards all of the excitement guaranteed by the coming events.  Stay tuned folks! 

(Dave Phillips is the webmaster for ECHO STATION, and generally tries to sit back and let the folks foolish enough to volunteer to help out with things run the place as much as possible.  He can generally be found romping around on the messsage boards, and shamelessly promoting his web hosting company, NovaTech Web Services.   If you've got some free time, love STAR WARS, and want to be a part of a still rapidly growing and evolving site, he'd love it if you'd drop him a note.)

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