So What's It All About?
The Past
A lot of people are mistakingly under the impression that I am some kind of dive bum playboy, wandering aimlessly around Latin America. The reality however is far from this. I am a simple computer guy, an Oracle DBA and Unix System Administrator to be more precise, that has been fortunate enough to have had oppurtunities to work on projects for cellular telecom billing systems in a lot of very nice locations.
To be successful at my job required me to be a bit of a geek and I openly confess to liking computers and engineering, especially very big fast ones! It kind of made sense to knock together a webpage, originally just to share pictures with friends and family and a few tech tips with colleagues.
As time passed and my website grew in popularity, I started to investigate search engine optimization (SEO) and very quickly found a new and very unusual hobby, the optimization of webpages to raise the position of keyword searches in the result sets of the major search engines.
The Present
AlanFormstone.com is still very much a homepage, but I am sure that those who have known my site from the very early days have noticed the underlying content slowly changing to be richer in information and to be less crass, though hopefully maintaining a personal feel. An audience of more than 18 thousand unique vistors a month (February 2006) has made me a somewhat self concious about the at times very crappy content, which still remains in the not so dark corners of this site.
A recent addition to the site are the numurous advertising blocks on all the new style pages. I apologise for these and I really did think I long and hard before adding them, but there are reasons for their presence; one being education.
Education because my interests in SEO have led to an new interest in SEM (Search Engine Marketing, and there is never a better way to learn anything than by digging your hands into the dirt and finding out for yourself exactly how things really are.
I hope the advertisments do not detract to heavily from the content and that with a little more tuning of relevance the ads can be a valuable addition.
The Future
It's time to jump in with the bigger players now and to take on some of the more competetive keywords, particularly I will target scuba diving related keywords, so expect to see some interesting content about this sport that I love so much, the idea being to pass saftey critical cave diving principles into the world of recreational open water diving, and also to provide a lot of quality underwater photography (as soon as my new housing arrives!).
A lot of the the old content that makes me cringe so much these days will be merged and manipulated to become nice new information pages, again hopefully retaining a personal touch.
The brightest stars in my future, clearly evident to those that have read the family pages, are my wife Liliana and our adorable little milk monster, Karin.
I hope you find something in these pages, either useful or entertaining. It is a great pleasure for me to edit and maintain.
Saludos,
