Over the years, I’ve been a number of different places, and generally taken far too many photos of them. I’ve kept a log of all these photos (partly to keep my family from worrying about me and partly to help me remember all the places I’ve been and people I’ve met) over that time. This site was first called europe.lanfear.com, then travel.lanfear.com, and now marcwan.com

The last time I updated the site was in mid-2000 to handle more than just the reports from the Europe trip I did in 1999. Since then, a single XML file has been suffering under the weight of about 100 trips and some 200 more sub-trip reports.

So, a few months ago, I started a little side project to rewrite the engine entirely from scratch, moving to PHP and MySQL, and handling some of the scalability issues by moving the image serving to Amazon’s S3 service. The result is a new site that, while superficially similar to the old one, is completely new and improved and more awesomer. By using MySQL’s FULLTEXT indexes, the site now has search capabilities, and I’ve also added support for panorama photos and YouTube-like videos that anybody can view in their browser.

The next time I get some spare time, I’ll go ahead and add in some support for comments, but for now, enjoy the new site, and the 20-odd new trip reports that just been added!

Sorry for the long pause in updating. I have spent the last couple of months writing a new blogging engine to power the Chipmunk Ninja web site. The problem with comments and extremely annoying process via which I would post new articles was getting to be a real problem.

The new system, while superficially quite similar to the old one, has a number of major new features: