The Beginnings and a strong motivation

I first got involved with discovering the internet and its potentials back in 1994, more or less at the same time I into Unix and Linux. Back then even here in Europe internet was not quite available for the masses but I was one of the few lucky ones to have some sort of access to it.

Those were the times were in our opinion, the world had a very negative image of Panama and the Panamanians. This was in part because of some unfortunate facts of our republican life, but when you add that to media sensationalism, biased opinions and things like that you end up with a totally distorted vision of other cultures and their people.

So I took on learning how to share information with this "new" medium and became one of the first 300 founding customers of the first ISP in my town. I have always been a pragmatic person and believe that once you more or less master the theory you can then reinforce the knowledge by doing something useful with it. My first project? well, my web pages about Panama!. Why? simply because I also wanted to change the ways the rest of the world looked upon my little country. Its purpose? education.

I had been working on it for some weeks already, transcribing information, giving it form, learning how to do things, etc. At the time I had also joined the first mailing list for Panamanians (at the time mostly those living abroad because we didn't have internet for the general public). Just a few days before I was planning to unleash my pages on the net I read an interesting message on that list, it was from Ing. Felipe Tribaldos (then a student) mentioning he had just published his pages about Panama!. Well, mine were not the first by just a couple of days.

Then thanks to that same list, created by Dr. Azael Barrera (then a Phd student) we more or less began to coordinate things and complement each other's target audience and the information provided. Then Azael Barrera also published his own pages about Panama with richness of information about the country side, and then we were also joined by Enrique Medina and Juan Varela.

What happened next

Of course, at times the load was a bit too much and I ended up placing a FAQ page (Frequently Asked Questions). Many people thought I was a travel agent, others thought I was a government tourist agency, or a detective that could find out or locate others, etc. But all in all it has been a rewarding experience.

Nowadays these pages are indexed by search engines (for good or bad), there are lots of links from libraries around the world. To my amazement these pages are also used by educational institutions around the world as part of their teaching reference material.

Lessons learned

My first mistake was to place my email address on the web pages -for feedback-, thanks to that these days my mailbox gets lots of useless SPAM mail which is very annoying. Of course in the beginnings the Internet had not many rotten people with nothing else to do than to aggravate others. I resolved the situation by using a contact form on the site, unfortunately it was too late for my mailboxes which had to be cancelled due to the large amount of SPAM.

I do not actually live in Panama (just yet), and although I do travel home nearly every year for visiting family, exploring places and gathering information; it has become difficult to keep certain information up to date, specially about nightlife in Panama.

The other mistake was that I have never derived any monetary profit from these pages -or the help provided- except for a couple of books. And needless to say, these pages have never been hosted on a free site and as such I have paid for these services out of my own pocket. So I would appreciate if you do show your appreciation by visiting the sites advertised on my banners. So far these pages have never been about monetary profit but times might change.

The present

The long overdue site overhaul has begun now in 2004 for reasons beyond my control. This necessary step marks the latest evolution of this site into one that will hopefully pay its own operational expenses. As I mentioned, in the past 10 years I derived no profit from this other than the satisfaction of running it.

Unfortunately times costs money, not only from unbillable hours but also of social life. So basically it came down to either let the site die and vanish into oblivion (a shame really), or bring it back to life but run it apart so that it at least pays for its own existance (my time provided for free) by means of donations, banner adverts and possible products, so your support and understanding is greatly appreciated.

Your Faithful WebMaestro

The Timeline

Here a brief timeline of the evolution of this site for those who might be interested and in case I start to forget LOL.

• 1994 - The site first appeared as part of my personal web account in the first ISP of the town I lived and one of the first few providers for the general population. This first generation site was crude (yet advanced at its time) and made completely of static HTML pages.
• 1999 - 2nd generation site hosted as a subdomain of Coralys.com. It contained a lot of dynamic pages based on PHP and DHTML. I wrote and used my own banner server.
• 2004 - 3rd generation, the long overdue revamping of the site. Still hosted as a subdomain of Coralys.com and rewritten completely using Microsoft technology (C# on ASP.NET 1.1)
• 2005 - Added the Expat Forums to allow more interactive and self-help of users.
• Aug. 2007 - Eliminated the old forums and upgraded it to the Community Server 2007 at the expense of having lost the posts and registered users (sorry no personnel to do the data entry).
• 2007 - 4th generation, another long awaited redesign with a new look, improved components and a proven formula. The site was completely redesigned and with a technology upgrade. It is still written in C# but using Microsoft ASP.NET v2.0