Having successfully navigated what must be the single longest season in Formula One history, Christine and I find ourselves with energy in reserve ahead of the sport's traditional winter break. We have many new things planned, so the next three months will mostly be spent working hard, but unlike last winter we don't need to take an excessively extended break.

Racing gets underway in just over 100 days and Christine has already requested a sizeable list of improvements to this very site. Probably not coincidentally that list only appears to require work from me, so I'm planning to disappear under a mountain of code for the next six to eight weeks. Keep an eye out for new and exciting things appearing in the new year.

Cold play

Christine meanwhile has a seemingly endless array of fresh content scheduled to keep people entertained until new cars launch ahead of the 2013 season. Including:

• The F1 Advent Calendar makes a welcome return
• Look out for more Sunday Hangouts
• The inaugural High Five Friday worked out well, expect to see this reappear soon
• Far too much nostalgia in the shape of Sidepodcast Jukebox
• A new season of Crashed Ice is underway and there are four more races to live comment
• The exciting return of Friday Fun
• You can never discount the possibility of a Sidepodfilmclub or two.

On top of all that, there are plenty of fantastic guest posts in the pipeline, including some debut authors, while many fabulous feature writers have exciting plans too.

Please note that Christine will also be manning the @sidepodcast twitter account in order to give me as little distraction as possible.

A winter's tale

Before I go bury myself in reams of code, it would be remiss of me not to thank everyone who has read, listened, watched and followed Sidepodcast this year. We knew our plans to push things forward so aggressively would impact the quantity of output we were able to produce this year and were fully prepared for a mass audience exodus while we chopped and changed so many things. We are hugely grateful to people for sticking around.

This time last year the site was saddled with an antiquated content management system, was unusable on mobile devices and didn't support the high resolution of moderns screens. Back then live threads didn't have their own space and the concept of regular columnists was little more than a loose proposal.

To have come from what we had to what we have in less than 12 months is incredible, we thank you for coming along for the ride.

Somewhere in the depths of my computer I found this old screenshot, dated 13th December 2011. I assume it was archived because that was the day Christine signed off the homepage redesign and work began in earnest.

Things have moved on a long way since then, but notably the race information countdown which didn't debut until mid-March was already visible (but likely not working).

We are in much the same position now. So many ideas, so much potential, so little time. We cannot wait to see what 2013 holds in store.