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In the Jacobean play The Revenger's Tragedy, the central figure, Vindice or Vendice, starts out as someone who has suffered injustice-  the murder of his love, but soon the play descends into a bloodbath where the victim has so exceeded any offence that he has become worse than the wrong he set out to right, only far worse.  It seems appropriate for the forum context that there are different spellings of the protagonist's name, and doubt about the identity of the author.

Last year I culled about 500 dead links from our database, but this year the total was lower- 231, just under ten percent.  This doesn't include inactive sites like blogs, just sites or pages that  have disappeared, and will include some sites that were unavailable when checked but still exist.

I have just cleaned out our links database and if it is anything like a representative sample of the ESL industry on the web, things are looking grim.  We had just under 3,000 links when I started and have just under 2,500 now.  It's a particularly dull and time-consuming job and I do it about once a year, though I skipped last year as I was on a slowish connection. Even so, it's a lot of dead links and right across the board.

The idioms section has had a display problem recently, with some html code appearing, so people may have seen entries with same strange bits using < >. Sorry for this; I have been going through and removing them.

Though the term information superhighway seems to have been consigned to history, the internet, in many ways, resembles a demolition derby more than a sleek road. Every year I clear out the dead links from our ESL links database; even though we add a new link most days, we now how forty fewer links than we did at the start of the year.

We currently have a list of nearly two thousand phrasal verbs. The distribution of particles/adverbs/prepositions is, however, dominated by a very small number: the top six account for well over a half of the total. After that, the next few account for most of the rest of the list, and it tails off very quickly; phrasal verbs are dominated by a very small number of particles.

We are adding a new section to the site that will be text-based, with texts and comprehension exercises. It is new, so it is still very small, but we will be adding to it on a regular basis. Please free to contact us to make suggestions or correct any mistakes.

We are canvassing opinions about accessing the site, the forum in particular, and would be very interested in any comments people might have, both positive and negative, about the procedures to sign up, etc.

I have just cleaned out our links database, which I do once a year. About 10% of the links were broken, similar to last year. Unless ESL is particularly bad for this, it doesn't bode well for the web. So much of the web is dependent on links, yet such a high breakage rate means that after a few years much of it will be unreadable, and particularly in areas like blogs where people tend to respond to things they have seen on the web and post their thoughts and the link.

We have just updated the Phrasal Verb section of the site and it now automatically creates quizzes based on the definitions of the verbs. One of the types of quizzes uses the particles and, therefore, generates a list. We have over 1,400 phasal verbs, which is a fairly representative sample, and it is clear that a small number of particles dominate: up, out, on, off, in and down account for about 65% of the total. Here's the full particle list: