The purpose of this blog is to provide information about places I have been, with a focus on historical significance. The initial entries will be reposts from pages of my previous website at www.msoe.edu/~westr or people.msoe.edu/~westr, which is no longer online.
I attended the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 2000 to 2004. MSOE provided it students and alumni with space on its servers for personal websites. I decided that since I had the space available, I might as well use it, and began to build a website in late 2002, going online in November. Some of the initial content included pictures I took of the MSOE campus and the surrounding area of Milwaukee, and of a visit to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.
After I graduated in 2004, I began rebuilding my website, bringing the new-and-improved version online on November 26, 2004. The pages about Milwaukee pictures and the Evergreen Aviation Museum became part of a new “PLACES” section and were joined by a number of other pages. In 2005 I joined a new social networking site called Bebo and posted some pictures from a classic car show on it. I figured out how to use those pictures on my website and Bebo began serving as a photo host for my website. I purchased a digital camera in late 2005 and began taking a lot of pictures and adding more content to the website.
On June 27th, 2012, MSOE stopped hosting personal websites for its alumni, and my website went offline. I still had all of the files on my computer and was considering simply rebuilding the site with a new host, but couldn’t make up my mind how to proceed. In late 2013 I discovered that Bebo had shut down, meaning that most of my pictures were no longer online either.
After buying an Android smartphone in December 2013, I decided I wanted to rebuild my website in some form. In June 2009 I had started two blogs on Blogger: AutoTour for car profiles, and ScreenViewer for TV and movie reviews. By the summer of 2010 I had essentially abandoned them, but I thought the format would be a good way to bring back my website content and pictures. So I created PlacesPages for the information from the old PLACES pages, and TrainPages for railroad-related content. There may be some overlap between PlacesPages and TrainPages as some items fall under both.
The information I post from my old website may be several years out of date, though where I have updated information I will include it. While my website had large all-inclusive pages, I will be dividing the information into small blog posts. One reason for this is that with my website I would sometimes receive an email with a question and could not tell what page the writer was referring to. With smaller blog entries, the comment sections will each be focused on a single topic. This will also make it easier for me to add additional posts in the future without having to edit the previous pages.
I plan to post information from pages of my old website in the order they were originally posted online. Once all of my previous content has been posted, I will begin adding new content. I eventually plan to begin posting to AutoTour and ScreenViewer again as well.
I hope you enjoy this blog and take a look at my others as well. I have plans for a lot of pages in the future. Thank you for visiting.
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