Scuba Diving, Cave Diving, Photography, Travel and More...

Saturday September 15th, 2007 - Lima, Peru

On the road again, but this time a little closer to Puerto Aventuras, our Mexican home. It"s good to be back in Latin America and I hope to publish quite a few pages from trips around Peru. for the site.

Last year was spent in the beautiful, but, at times, freezing cold country of Bulgaria . There is a lot to catch up with, but I am determined to catch it all up eventually.

AlanFormstone.com continues to go from strength to strength and is currently serving travel photography, open water scuba diving, cave diving pages and news from the Riviera Maya to more than 50,000 unique visitors a month, a figure that I find quite incredible, considering how the site started out as a simple collection of photographs generated on a yahoo tool.

With this level of traffic, I become increasingly aware that the quality of the site is lacking in some areas and so I have undertaken a considerable rebuild, the details of which I will document as a new topic.

Web Design and SEO

Web design and SEO (Search Engine Optimization ) are complex subjects that have have very much taken over Oracle and UNIX in the satisfaction of my "geek hunger"! Anyway you will be able to read more about that soon as I document what is involved in the design maintenance and promotion of a website.

Photography

2005 also marks the death of my old camera. The little Canon Powershot S200 finally succumbed to years of abuse and made the journey to the great digital darkroom in the sky. In a final act of defiance it painfully discharged the flash capacitor into my thumb as I gave up my attempts to revive it. Goodbye my trusty little camera. You will be missed.

This little camera served me well over the years, and I think I learned a lot about composition through working around the camera"s limits. I have finally taken the plunge and bought a more flexible camera and a few lenses. Hopefully the technical aspects of my photography will improve, particularly the underwater photography. Only time will tell!

I hope very much that you find something of interest in these pages, whether you visit as an armchair explorer or seriously reseaching some of the topics that are documented here. This site is a great pleasure for me to edit, write and maintain, but ultimately it exists to be read and enjoyed.

Saludos!

Alan