When we took over the publication of Anglicans Online, it consisted of 77 pages with a total of 720 kilobytes of text. It had 800 links to external resources, parishes, dioceses, and the like. It was generating about 1000 "page views" per week, and served a readership of about 5000 people. And it had an exclamation point. Computer archives being what they are, we can actually show you what Anglicans Online looked like the day Tod moved on to other things.

The internet has grown since then, and Anglicans Online has grown along with it. We've lost the exclamation point, but everything else has gotten bigger and bigger. Today on its fifth anniversary, Anglicans Online is 330 pages (excluding the information that we mirror from some other places) and has 2900 kilobytes of text (about half the size of the complete works of Shakespeare). It has 6000 links to external resources, it has its own specialized Anglican search engine, and it averages 10,000 page views per week, serving a readership of about 80,000 people. In its lifetime, Anglicans Online has had about 1,000,000 visits from 120,000 people. More than half of those million visits have been in the last year.

Under Tod's leadership, Anglicans Online had established a reputation as a useful international resource. We felt that it was our obligation as its new editor and publisher to make it be THE international resource, to focus on content, on breadth, on reliability, on universality, and on fairness. We were happy enough with its existing graphic design to leave it alone so we could focus on content, though we have replaced all of the components of that design with more modern technology and we have made sure that every page conforms to the standard page design. We annotate every page with the date it was last updated. We check to make sure that our pages can be read easily on every imaginable browser.

We chose to make the News Centre a primary source of Anglican news for the whole world, and we chose to make it as unbiased as we knew how. Yes, we occasionally make fun of things like the Millennium dome and cybernaut helmets, but we report all sides of every substantive issue, and do our best not to foster hatred or conflict.

We rely heavily on the Internet and on Internet technology. Rather than copying information, we link to it. We focus on giving you access to primary sources of information, original documents, and unedited material. We have neither the time nor the inclination to do extensive writing of our own; we focus our energies on organizing the information that is already there and writing sparse commentaries about it.

If you have read our publication for any length of time you will know that we often make references to "the light" and "into the light" and "bringing the light". To us the light is part of so many symbols of the good news of Jesus Christ, and always thinking about the light, and bringing light, helps us stay even-handed, focused, and faithful as we edit Anglicans Online.

We're going to save a copy of the entire contents of this fifth-anniversary edition and on our tenth anniversary in December 2004, when we look back on today's exciting and dynamic Anglicans Online we hope that it will look quaint and historic.

Thanks to all of you for helping to get us where we are today.