It was one year and one week ago, that the SMP published a new page - the activations page - designed to display SOTA activators’ and chasers’ logs in graphical format on a map. The page was conceived in late December 2013, took maybe ten days to implement and, after having it viewed and given the “thumbs up” as being potentially useful by at least one member of the SOTA MT, it went live at the beginning of January 2014.
At first, the page had access to only a couple of hundred SOTA activation records, but they were enough to give the user an idea of what the page could do. User reception of the page was very encouraging, with a number of users offering good suggestions for improvement of the page, and these suggestions were rapidly implemented. There remained the problem of gaining access to a larger set of data.
Ongoing discussions with the SOTA database manager Andy in the spring of 2014 eventually resulted in a much larger body of data being made available in late spring of last year, with the result that a great many SOTA activists and chasers could view their activities on the map in the page. These data were contained in a snapshot copy, created at that time, of the SOTA database. Unfortunately, since that time, this data snapshot has not been updated, with the result that the page as it stands now can only offer data at least nine months old.
I have to say that this is a situation with which I have been distinctly uncomfortable. It may well appear to the many visitors to the page that the SMP - and by implication I myself - could not be bothered, or lacked the ability, to keep the data up-to-date. I’d like to state here categorically that this has not been the case: I care very deeply about the software products that I create and maintain, and consider user satisfaction to be a matter of paramount importance.
To his credit, Andy has done what he could behind the scenes to make provision for access to the live data, but his time has been severely limited - his is a difficult job indeed, and I personally wonder whether he might not have taken on too much for one merely mortal man to handle! 
So, it’s with renewed enthusiasm that I look forward to the new developments which Andy has mentioned in his review of software services for 2014, and which promise soon to make the database available for 3rd-party applications, including the SMP. Here’s looking to a more productive year in 2015 - over to you, Andy!
Rob DM1CM