It seems like such a long time ago now, but back in 1998 I started my online presence with www.thespirit-online.com. It was my home for quite a few years, where I detailed my life and adventures. It also was the online storage location for all my photos.
Back then everything was manual. There wasn’t the free online photo storage locations that we have today, so I had to upload photos to the server, and use Microsoft Frontpage to edit the photo web page so that the photos would be visible. It was quite a hassle, but I loved it nevertheless.
By 2005, we had Flickr (bought by Yahoo!) and Picasa (bought by Google). I used both of them, not really sure which way I should go.
By 2008, I decided to stick with Picasa, and put most of my photos into their. You can see them by clicking on Photo Albums at the top of this page… or you can just click here. The photo albums that are accessible here go back only to the beginning of 2007, when I moved back to Australia from New Zealand.
There’s a LOT of albums that I have to hunt down between 2005 and 2007. I’m not really sure where they are…
But regardless, I know I’ve got backups on DVD of every photo I’ve taken over the years. That’s a lot of photos.
A few weeks ago, I discovered that my old website, thespirit-online.com, was offline. There were no files available. I tried contacting my website host in America, but they weren’t answering my emails. So I re-delegated the domain to the host I use for alanzeyes.com and uploaded all my website files from backup to the new host. I must say, I was pleased to have the site back again.
My friend Ken asked why I bothered. Well, the simple reason is that it has great sentimental value. It has 4 years of journal entries, and 6 years of photo albums that are not stored anywhere else. At all. That’s their home, and as a result, it’s my home too.
I want to look after and maintain my home.
But the fact that the site went offline and the hosts unavailable gave me cause to worry. I decided that I needed to engage in a major project to re-house all my online photo albums in one, secure and backed-up location.
Last year I started the process of transferring all my journal entries from all the different sources into this one journal. I completed that. Then I started the process of re-tagging them all according to their content. I’m still 3/4 of the way through that.
My next major project will be to download, or restore from backup, every photo album I’ve ever created over the past 11 years and upload them to Picasa for secure online storage.
That’s going to be a lot of albums. Which will mean a very long Photo Albums page…
I think I might have to separate my album pages into years.
Back when I first started displaying my photos online, I never thought about what I’d be doing in 10 years time. That’s what I have to think about today.
What fun!
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