Bob Julian writes:

Good idea! Bob's note prompted me to run some numbers. From our inception on September 4, 1998 through last week (March 25, 2012) there have been a total of 712 issues. This includes a few special issues sent midweek with time-sensitive information. But for the most part we've published on a regular weekly basis for going on fourteen years. Early issues had just a handful of articles but this measure grew over time to an average of twenty.

Our total article count to date is a whopping 14,374, all archived on the NBS web site. This should make clear what I've often said over the years - we're not just publishing a weekly newsletter, we're building a web site. It should now also be clear why I make it a point to quote extensive passages from other web sites and store copies of all the images in our own archive - web content often moves or vanishes over time, but our E-Sylum archive has remained intact. Links may grow stale, but the content we published ourselves has been preserved.

None of this could have happened so smoothly without the support of our webmaster Bruce Perdue and John Nebel, who has provided web site hosting gratis for NBS since our web site's inception. Not only that, John did the computer programming required to automate the population of the E-Sylum archive - every Sunday night Bruce uploads the complete E-Sylum issue to the site, and in the wee hours of the morning John's scripts kick in and split the issue into individual article pages, update the tables of contents and create our RSS feed, like obedient little robots.

And I would be remiss not to thank NBS for their funding in late 2007 to pay for web designers and developers who helped spiff up the site and even more importantly, allowed us to make the leap from plain text to HTML in the weekly newsletter - that was like stepping into the Technicolor Land of Oz from the dreary black-and-white past.

If you haven't visited our archive lately, check it out. Bruce and John have already implemented the changes Bob suggested. And thus ends another article. Thanks for sticking with us!

To access the E-Sylum archive, see:www.coinbooks.org/club_nbs_esylum_archive.html

To read the complete E-Sylum Table of Contents, see:www.coinbooks.org/esylum_toc.html