Site History

This website was originally conceived while I lived as an expatriate in Germany from 1999-2003.  After doing a little bit of traveling in the area, I decided that it would be worthwhile to write about all the locations I visited on the web.  The originally intended audience were fellow expatriates looking for places to go and things to do.  The early pages had little text and were limited to convincing the reader that the place was worth visiting (or in only a couple cases, not worth visiting).  But as the site grew, the audience and focus changed toward travelers and curiosity-seekers around the world, and the pages evolved to true first-person travelogues simply relating the experienced of being there.

What Happened Then?

After moving to the US in 2005, the page sat in suspended animation. There were 300+ pages and over 1500 photographs, but the site was built using an old out-of-date software package called Microsoft FrontPage, which was designed back in the day when Yahoo! teamed up with GeoCities to allow people to make their own personal websites — long before WordPress.

Unfortunately, as time went by, FrontPage was soon no longer supported and GeoCities ceased to exist. Yahoo! created a small business system to replace it and I managed to get the site migrated. However, by about 2010 all FrontPage support was gone and the pages were effectively orphaned. You could get to them through an internet search, but I could not access them to fix all the errors and such. And there it sat until Yahoo! Small Business outsourced or realigned or something …

Oh No!

Oh, yes. It was all lost when the site was acquired by another hosting site. In 2017, I attempted to re-build the entire site using WordPress, but at the time I knew little about it and definitely did not know what I was doing. The site was awful and I basically gave up on it after a few months. Around the same time, I took over as the inaugural managing editor of one website, in which I learned all about WordPress and got pretty good (for an amateur) at it, and then became the managing editor of a second website (Talking About Organizations) and a third (Defense Management Library).

But this site, which I found myself paying for on an annual basis, just kinda sat dormant.

“No more,” I said, and pledged to rebrand it (and myself, I suppose) — moving the site to a vastly superior host (Bluehost, if you must know) and rebuilding (in the right way) both the travel site and one focused on my professional work in organization theory, management studies, and the military. I will also add more sites over time as I also have strong interests in Catholicism and diversity, equity, and inclusion. But it will take time, so as I rebuild this site, please be patient. I promise it will be all worth it!

All the best! Regards, Tom Galvin