I just wanted to post a quick blurb for everyone so you can get an idea of where we are, where we're going, and how you can help.

First of all, thank you for participating on the site those of you that do. I've spent a lot of time trying to streamline things and make them as user friendly as possible as well as make room for future growth of the site. And all of this work will be for nothing without people actually visiting the site.

I've been noticing a little bit more traffic lately, and thats awesome! Also we're finally getting users trickling in from outside of the CC2 list! I want to encourage you to share the link to the site with all of your friends and fellow gaming buddies. Even if its casual mention only. Also, don't forget that if you need a place to actually display your map and get feedback on it you can upload the map here with no problem! Currently our maximum file upload size is 5Mb...Thats pretty decent I think.

As I've stated before, I'm trying to grow the website a little beyond just being a forum...I'll need your patience as well as your suggestions to make this happen. On the horizon I have the Google Map Viewer project, and thats the biggest thing on my plate right now other than the occasional small symbol pack.

I'd like to offer more features to industry pro's in the very near future, because if the industry pros hangout here, so will the regular people and the hobbiests. One of my plans to offer industry pro's is a developers blog service (similar to Simon's livejournal, but on a mapping site).

Ad revenue is slowly increasing...But wait...Don't get worried...I'm NOT relying on that ad revenue for the survival of this site at the moment. I'm getting about half of my hosting costs from the google ads per month, and that makes me very happy. Of course I can't actually get that money until it gets to a total of 100 bucks, but it could happen one day. I'm not encouraging you to click any ads, because that is against googles ad policy (so please don't abuse the ads thinking you're helping the site out). But the fact that the ads are starting to become more and more relevant to the content of this site is encouraging. I log into the admin panel occasionally and sometimes I'll see about 5 or 6 instances of googles crawl bot crawling the site.

I've updated the attachment mod to automatically create thumbnails for images that are greater than 640 pixels by 480 pixels. This will make page loads faster and will also keep the websites template in tact...I don't believe its retro-active so I may go in and reupload some of the attachments over the next few days.

All-in-all I'm very happy with the way the site is going, and again, I thank you all for participating. Remember, the site is free for you to use...don't think about it as "Robbies website" Think of it as The Cartographers Guild. I just happen to be the guy that built it.

See ya in the forums!