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There's nothing impressive about the photo, I'm just using it as a pretext for conversation.
It was around 1997 that I built a first geocities page. A colleague from a newspaper called saying she wanted to interview me for an article she was preparing. There I was on that newspaper, encouraging the common man to build a geocities page. "No programming ability is needed" (I said something along those lines) and this was 1997, way before the blogs, the twitter of the Facebook.
There were very few Internet users at the time, and most of the connections were dialup with America Online and probably CompuServe still going strong.
Geocities permitted to download a programming tool. It was java based, I think, and it allowed the pasting of photos, editing of texts. Of course there wasn't a database behind so all of these pages were static and it took the writing of individual links to glue all the pages together.
A tool like blogger, which I discovered around 2004, was the stuff of science fiction and years ahead of that primitive Internet universe. (The first blogs reportedly appeared in 1998-1999).
Geocities was closed in 2009. For months I kept ignoring admin emails reminding me to back up all of my photos, texts, or else, they'd face permanent deletion.
It was not the end of the world. Like the first photo I showed, there's tools on the Internet that keep copies (or "caches") of my old geocities, the fact is that, if I really wanted to, and had the necessary time and effort to invest, I could reconstruct my old geocities from scratch. There's places like oocities and thewaybackmachine that have stocked old pages from the nineties. I should just scour in the correct places and it'd be back.
In case you wonder, Perast is a little town in the Adriatic, I visited there in the Summer of 2001. I know this is a cliched phrase but Perast really is "a charming little town" of Venetian architecture.
And while I'm on the subject, 2001 was a fine year. Reveal was the latest R.E.M. album (but the discos where busy playing "Simarik" by a certain Tarkan). I made a lot of friends which I now miss.
Back in 2002 when you typed "Perast" in google, my image was one of the first hits to appear. (I have reason to believe that the photo was used without proper authorisation by some other sites).
I just typed "Perast" on another window, the image results today are 198,000 and my photo is nowhere to be seen!
I have the intention to unbury some of those old travel photos, maybe post them here.
