If you build it, they will come...

Building this site was a lot easier compared to 15 years ago when I built my first site.

My first site was just a few html pages with a couple cgi scripts running on my own Apache server. I wrote some perl scripts, so visitors could post their comments. I was in grad school, so I could spend days and days of debugging, lining up the text and pictures, and making sure everything was working. Most of the visitors were just other grad students who had internet access. It was fun but a lot of hard work just for a few visitors!

Fast forward to now. Building this site took me only a weekend. I signed up the trial from Smugmug on Friday and I got my customized site up by Sunday. I became a paying customer a week later. It was easy! I just added a blog and it only took me a couple hours to integrate with the rest of the site, with custom domain! No html, no scripting, just point-and-click and cut-and-paste. It is amazing how fast technologies have changed.

15 years ago, I rolled my own TRI-X pan film and shot it with my manual Minolta camera. I developed my photos in a darkroom. I ran my website on a Sun workstation sitting in my office.
And my laptop was an Apple PowerBook Duo.

Now I shoot digital with a Nikon D300. I develop the photos using Adobe Lightroom running on a MacBook Pro. My website is hosted by Smugmug. My blog is hosted by Blogger. I put some of my pictures in flicker and and selling some of them at ClusterShot. I use PayPal to pay for my purchase and I use Google Voice for phone calls. Best of all, there is a very large population out there that has internet access. Hopefully, I will have more visitors this time around.