A Message From Infinite Frontiers
Welcome to our regular message page where we'll have our chance to get a few things off our chest and tell you about a few things that have been going on with the site that we don't think are suited for anywhere else...
16th December 2002
Okay, so I know I promised a quicker update, but things have been a bit busy lately, at home, at work, and in life generally! The big thing with the site at the moment is the rate at which it is expanding and growing. We are steadily bringing more writers on board and it's really making a difference. In the next couple of weeks, we should be adding new people to our team of regulars, and this will mean that we will have about six or seven gaming writers, about four or five sci-fi writers, and many more!
As well as that, we are now getting so much support from game companies that we have a stockpile of games that we are trying to work through to review for the site! At the moment, we are working on reviews for the PC, Playstation, Playstation 2, Gamecube, and XBox! Not to mention a growing pile of sci-fi novels waiting to be read...!
Hits wise, things are doing really well, with the site now standing at 12,500 hits. Hopefully, this will reach 14,000 by Christmas, then we can work on promoting the site better, to try to aim for 50,000 by this time next year, and ideally a lot more!
Things are going to be taking a short break for the site in a week's time when Cher and I go away for a long Christmas break. We are not sure yet whether or not we'll be taking a PC with us, but if not, we won't be reading our emails or working on the site for the best part of two weeks. Saying that, the site will still be here and I'm sure that most of you who visit on a regular basis haven't seen everything on offer yet!
There's been a lot of interest in our downloads section lately, with a lot of you downloading files from the Commercial Section. With some great Amiga, PC and Commodore 64 games on offer, it's no wonder it's a popular part of the site! We are trying to negotiate for many more games to give away, and we are always open to your suggestions on what games you'd like us to try and give away. Sugestions to our usual email address...
Talking of suggestions, we are also looking at other ways to improve the site and to add more content so we want to know just what you want to see on the site, and what sections you would like to see us add more content to. Also, if there are sections not online that you'd like to see added, again please let us know.
Anyway, I'll be back with another update in the New Year. Until then, have a great Christmas,
Simon Plumbe
12th November 2002
Well, it's been another eventful couple of weeks. We are still working with half a PC for designing the site and it really is starting to have an impact on the amount of work we have been able to do updating it and adding new material. Saying that, we've still added lots of new reviews and much more!
The biggest event for us in the last couple of weeks has to be the number of hits to the site and we are pleased to say that we have now gone through the 10,000 barrier. Things are doing far better for the new site than the old Infinite Frontiers site ever did and we are already fast approaching the total number of hits received by our old site, and this site is a staggering 20 times larger than the old one!!
The gaming section is still doing well and every day we are getting more support from within the industry and new products keep dropping through the letterbox for us to review. It means that we can really expand our gaming coverage - the only problem we have is finding the time to write all the reviews!
Finally, an apology for a few other things that are causing delays in developments to the site lately... I've been spending more than a little time playing Colin McRae Rally 3 on the Playstation 2 and Dungeon Siege on the PC and I am really finding it hard to drag myself back to the keyboard to carry on writing. I might have to lock the games up for a month or two just so I can get back to work again!
Until next time...
Simon Plumbe
27th October 2002
Well, it's been over a month since I wrote anything here. To be honest, things have been so busy with the site and many of the other projects we have been involved in that I haven't really had the chance to do much here. Saying that, the site and our work behind the scenes has been undergoing a lot of changes lately...
We finally have our 3D News Service working within the Vulcan Portal and it's already getting some great feedback from people who have been using it. Hopefully, many will then come over and visit the site and see all the stuff we have to offer. It only took a day or so to develop initially - the main problem we had to deal with was uploading it all, but it seems to be running smoothly now!
Things didn't help for us when our main development PC died earlier today and it left us without a working PC to continue writing and designing the site. In the end, we have managed to get occasional use of it while we wait for a £100 plus repair job to be carried out, and all our uploading and emailing is going to be done from other machines. Sometimes, I wonder why we do it!!
Things have been going well apart from that. We are expanding many areas of the site that have been quiet for some time including the disability section, we are adding a lot more game reviews (thanks to all the companies now supplying us with review copies), and we are even raising funds towards the site costs through our auctions on eBay. Generally then, things are doing okay...
Things may go quiet for the site in about five or six weeks though, as Cher and I are planning a short break to celebrate our first anniversary together. Obviously, I don't think we'll be doing much work on the site that weekend!!
Anyway, that's all for now, but I'll try to write the next update a little quicker!
Simon Plumbe
23rd September 2002
Well, it's official - I am totally exhausted through working on this website!! It's been an eventful week or so and I've just returned from the MicroMart Computer Fair at the NEC in Birmingham where I've been demonstrating the website all weekend. It's been a great chance for us to meet visitors old and new, make new contacts, and hopefully get fresh content for the site, but boy was it hard work!
We were set up as part of the Amiga section of the Feature Area (which was being co-ordinated by our very own Sven Harvey for MicroMart) and we managed to position ourselves right next to Fleecy Moss from Amiga where he was showcasing the new Amiga One - not a bad spot for us to be in!
It paid off quite well though as I found out over the weekend as I was updating the site and adding content from the show almost as it was happening. The hits we had immediately after each day of the show were quite impressive and we can only hope that many of these will become regular visitors.
We've been going all out with our downloads section at the moment as well. We have now started our commercial software downloads section and at the moment, you can get XTreme Racing for the Amiga, and four classic Commodore C64 games from Llamasoft all legally downloadable. Obviously, there won't be many of you downloading files with a C64 (although it CAN be done!) so they are here for those of you with a C64 emulator.
We will be adding some more commercial titles shortly including hopefully some PC products, more Amiga titles, and more classic C64 games from Llamasoft. We are also looking at converting some of our PC jigsaws across to the Amiga, and possibly finding some PC and Amiga programmers to write exclusive new software for us to include. Let us know what you think.
While on the subject of the Commodore C64, it was clear from the MicroMart Fair that there is still a lot of interest and life in the old machine, so we may be adding a new area to our Computing / Gaming section to cater for this legendary computer. If you saw what one heavily expanded C64 was running at the Fair, you'd see why we're thinking about covering it here!
Some of you may be wondering what we (Simon and Sven) actually look like? Well, in the PC section, we have a report and photos from the MicroMart event and you can finally see for yourselves! If we can think of legitimate reasons, we may bring you photos of some of our other team members over time, and maybe even from a few of our visitors... you have been warned!!
Well, that's all I can think of for now. I've got the next week off work so I'll be adding more stuff to the site, negotiating more deals to bring you some great free downloads, and we should have more information on our Transformers event as well and maybe even confirming a date and venue.
If any of you run any local events and you're interested in having us coming along and demonstrating our website, our work or anything else, please get in touch and we'll see what we can do...
Simon Plumbe
14th September 2002
It's been a really eventful week or so for us here at Infinite Frontiers. We've seen the site continue to grow at an impressive rate to the extent that we are now approaching 6,000 hits and by the end of this weekend we should have reached that figure. We have also been rather busy behind the scenes to bring you some great new content that will be coming your way rather soon...
First, we have a few more interviews lined up for our gaming section. The first is with Gameboy Advance developers Tuna Technologies, the other with PC company (and former Amiga publishers) Vulcan Software. Both of these should be online in the next week or two.
Still with gaming and we are pleased to announce that the commercial Amiga racing game, XTreme Racing is coming to Infinite Frontiers Online. We have discussed the issue with the programmers (Tuna Technologies) and we will be bringing you this full game FREE!! This should be ready for downloading in a couple of days time.
Also, we are now talking to a number of top games developers and publishers with a view to being added to mailing lists to receive review copies of forthcoming titles. What this will mean for the site is that we will be able to review more products than ever and the gaming section should expand quite significantly and as a result of this, we have expanded the site to cater for X-Box owners as well. At the moment, we are already working with Codemasters, THQ, Activision and Lucas Arts with more companies being talked to...
Also, I had a shock phone call a few days ago from a local newspaper wanting to do a feature on Infinite Frontiers, our work and our website! We should be doing the interview over the weekend and this should be going into print on Friday. The paper has a circulation of around 30,000 households so that should see us getting a great boost in terms of visitors to the site next weekend. If we can, we want to try and get a lot of new content online by then to welcome all the new people to the site.
That's it for this week, but I'll be back soon with more news and developments and behind the scenes gossip from Infinite Frontiers.
Simon Plumbe
1st September 2002
We've had a great week with the website and our activities generally. We have been working on the site quite a lot in the last week or so and we've added quite a bit of new content including more puzzles and quizzes, more downloads and we are giving our videos a facelift, bringing you new and enhanced versions of files that are already online for those of you with broadband connections or who don't mind the extra loading time! At the moment in terms of content, there is now about 70Mb of data online on the site and we should be taking this up to around 100Mb in the next 7-10 days!
We are now rapidly approaching 5,000 hits and we expect to reach this in the next day or two. Also, the amount of information being transferred from the site is growing at an alarming rate with the figures for August showing an increase in traffic of well over 200%!! It's still not enough for us though and we want more people visiting the site and downloading the goodies on offer!
One of the things we are thinking about is how to make use of the extra storage space that we now have access to. Do you want us to have more Amiga and PC downloads? Do you want more videos? How about more artwork? Or would you like to have downloadable music from the site? We'd love to hear your views so we can make this site into the type of website YOU want to visit and spend time on.
We'd like to see more interaction from you as well - we have a few Star Trek quizzes where there are some prizes on offer and we could also do with some help updating the sci-fi fandom directory and our events calendar. If you can help in any way, please get in touch.
We are going to be approaching a number of companies and organisations soon to try to get more products to review for the site as well as bringing in additional funding to help us with our work. We have the option of expanding the site storage further, but we need the extra cash in order to be able to do this. Obviously, if we can raise extra cash, we can then look at publicising the site further and investing more money into improving it for everyone.
Well, that's it for this week. Enjoy the site!
Simon Plumbe
24th August 2002
It's been a busy time for us here at Infinite Frontiers. We are trying to make the site more accessible and easier for people to find and we are starting our extensive publicity campaign to let more people know about the site. As part of this, we are in the process of registering new domain names for the website to make finding us that bit easier and we expect to have a considerable number of names registered to us by the end of the year.
Starting things off we have several new names for the site including:- www.infinitefrontiers.org, www.infinitefrontiers.org.uk, and www.autoassembly.org.uk, all of which point directly to this site and are much easier to remember that www.infinitefrontiers.0catch.com! Many people who are interested in our Auto Assembly Transformers events will only be interested in that aspect of our work, so we felt that a dedicated domain name for that would be useful for our Transformers visitors.
The site is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate and we have just had over 4,000 hits now since going online. We're also expanding the content online at a rate of around 1Mb a day so, although we are going to be taking full advantage of the Bank Holiday weekend to add a lot of new art, articles, reviews and downloads. As such, we are getting ready to upgrade the site in the next few days to increase our online storage to a massive 500Mb so if you think the site is big now, wait until you see what we have planned!!
We are slowly starting to expand our team working on the site as well, so you should start to see even more content than ever, along with more subtle improvements. Dave Munroe will be taking on the role of becoming our lead site tester and he'll be reporting back to us on all of the little glitches, typos and other problems he will find on the site on a daily basis so we can fix them as quickly as possible. We know there are one or two image problems that we need to fix, and part of Dave's task will be to help us identify what needs to be done!
Simon Plumbe
9th August 2002
Well, I'm sitting here writing this exactly six years to the day since we held our first Star Trek convention, Delta Quadrant. As an organisation, we've come along way since then with our Star Trek club Alpha Quadrant growing to just under 600 members across the UK, and we have a new and successful website.
It's astonishing to think that this month, Infinite Frontiers will have been around for 13 years and in that time has been involved in running three fan clubs, running the Star Trek convention, has run events for three different types of fandom, and has produced countless fanzines in a variety of format. Looking back, I'm amazed at what we've managed to achieve so far, although I am convinced that the best is yet to come and I sincerely hope that this website will be at the heart of all our future activities.
We are still faced with the day to day issues of financing everything for the site, so please try to help out if you can - take a look at our merchandise section to see what's on offer. We have the chance to expand our online storage once again and improve the file capacity at the same time for as little as £2 a month on top of what we are alredy paying. If we can get the extra income to cover this, we'll be able to add even more files and offer enhanced versions of all our videos for those of you with broadband connections.
To help this further, we are now making copies of the entire website available on CD for anyone who is interested. As well as the site, the CD will have additional videos, artwork, articles, software and more. It's a steal at just £5!
Simon Plumbe
31st July 2002
It's been a pretty amazing week for the site - we've been expanding most areas of the site, adding new sections and features and generally improving things all round. We've now got FIVE videos online for you to watch and enjoy, we've launched our free writer's Workshop (and already have a few volunteers signed up) and we're starting to add more material to some of the sections online that have been a little underdeveloped including our Gameboy Advance reviews...
In terms of stats, we've just gathered the end of month stats for the site and we are pleased to announce that we have just had over 2,200 hits to the site since launch!! To put that into perspective, we have had more than double the number of hits we received to the site last month. In addition, we have used over 60% more bandwidth so not only are more people visiting the site, but they are downloading more too! Because of this, we have decided to extend the deadline on a lot of the downloads and we are going to be keeping all of the files on the site for a bit longer so you still have time to download stuff for free!!
We're still looking at ways of getting more people to visit the site and to try to generate more income for the site as well - our running costs for the site are relatively inexpensive considering what we are offering and if you can help in any way, it would be greatly appreciated.
One thing that has happened over the last five weeks with the site is that I've been off work with a couple of injuries and as such, I've been able to spend quite a bit of time writing and the site has been expanded to have almost 40Mb of data online!! I'm expecting to be going back to work in the next few days, but I will still do everything I can to ensure that there is something new added to the site most days.
Another new development is that we are now in the early stages of planning our third event for Transformers fans. Auto Assembly III will be a one-day event some time early next year. If you are interested in attending, please get in touch with us and we'll add you to our mailing list for further news and developments.
Simon Plumbe
23rd July 2002
Things have been going from strength to strength with the site yet again. It's been a memorable week with our first sponsor on board in the form of Silvervision, UK distributors of WWE videos and DVDs - we are participating in their affiliate scheme and this should help us raise funds to keep this web site growing.
Also, we've been getting more and more hits all the time and at the time of writing this, we had just under 1,700 hits - not bad for a site that's only been online for six weeks!! We're still not satisfied though, and we want to go beyond 2,000 hits by the end of the month and we are hoping to set a target of 20,000 by the end of this year and it looks as if we are on target to achieve this.
We're making slow progress now on expanding the site generally. It's my intention to add articles and features to all areas of the site equally and ensure that we don't become too fixated on any one topic or subject. Naturally, because of our background, there will still be an emphasis on computing and sci-fi, but you should see plenty of other material as well.
One thing we would like to say is that while we know we have a vast number of people visiting the site now, not everyone is on our mailing list. Please spare a few minutes to fill in the form on the site and you'll get regular news updates on the site and our activities, as well as access to exclusive competitions and free downloads.
Anyway, enjoy the site and I'll be back here next week with more thoughts and comments...
Simon Plumbe
17th July 2002
It's been something of a mixed week for the web site. We have now had well over 1,300 hits to the site since it's launch approximately six weeks ago which is a pretty impressive figure by anyone's reckoning, although we do want more! Also, we would like to see more people making use of the downloads section - all of the files available there are free to download with no hidden catches, so please feel free to fill your hard drive with goodies!!
Also, regular visitors will have noticed that there haven't been many updates in the last week or so. Well, I've been away for a week spending some time with my fiancée and I only returned home last night, so please be patient. I am planning an overhaul on the Downloads section and the Art Gallery, but I want to get more articles and features written and edited as well to give the site a massive boost, but as with everything this all takes time.
If you don't mind seeing a lot more Star Trek, sci-fi, and computing content, we can expand the site dramatically in the next 7-10 days but it's up to you - let us know what you think. We do have a lot of material in our archives going back a few years and we can make a lot of this ready quite quickly so it's up to you.
The take-up of our subscription service has been slow, although this is understandable while the site is still in it's early stages. As an added incentive, for the first 50 people to sign up, we will send you a bonus piece of software by email that will only be available to subscribers as a thankyou for joining up.
We should have our links section online soon as well - I'm just experimenting with a few ideas for the format and style and once I've figured this out, the links should go online quite quickly.
Finally, I'm going to be sorting through the cupboards this week to see what pieces of sci-fi merchandise that Infinite Frontiers has lying around that we had for some of the raffles at our Star Trek club meetings. Once these have all been sorted, expect to see a full list in the sales section and we will be selling everything off at silly money prices, so now's the chance for you to pick up a bargain or two!!
Anyway, enjoy the site, and please feel free to contact us for any reason.
Simon Plumbe