Category: Site Updates

All my Disney visits…

On my About page, I have been trying to reconstruct a list of all the times I visited Disneyland and Walt Disney World with my digital camera.

In those early days of digital photography, my camera did have a clock but it did not have a screen. The only way I could set the time was by hooking it to a computer. As such, early photos might have the wrong time zone, or even the wrong date. I’ve done my best to correct what I can and rename my photos, but it’s clear I still have some more work to do.

One thing I noticed was it showing me taking pictures at Disneyland and Walt Disney World on the same day — there was actually one day in-between those trips.

I also noticed a few screen grabs from my digital camcorder were off.

But hey, it’s closer!

Until next time…

Tense topic.

I’ve been asked why I refer to things that are in the park today in past tense. When I write about my experience from, say, 1996, I am speaking about that experience at that point in time. Thus I might talk about how there “was a very cool effect” back then, even if the same effect is still there today.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. There’s going to be a ton of past tenses coming up. I already have weekly photo essays scheduled out for the next few months.

Until last time…

Welcome to the DisneyFans.com blog!

Welcome to one of the oldest Disney fan sites on the internet (though not at this domain). This site is part of my DisneyFans.com project which originated as a free home page way back in 1995. I decided to finally start using this domain for new articles like those I used to post to my old site back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

For those unfamiliar with my background, from around 1995 to 1999 I was travelling for work and found myself in Orlando, Florida and Irvine, California several times each year. I ended up with annual passes to both Disneyland (when it was just one park) and Walt Disney World (when it only had three parks) for those years. I acquired a digital camera in 1996 and began documenting all my trips, and sharing those photos online (initially through an FTP server I ran at nights over a dialup connection on a Windows 3 laptop). What a long, strange trip it’s been since!

After that job ended, I switched to only visiting Disney for vacations, and then mostly to Disneyland (my favorite of all the U.S. parks). I tried to make two or three trips each year. This ended in 2009 when I finally ran out of income. After that, I went vacationless for nine years and unplugged from the Disney fan community.

In 2017 I had a unique opportunity to join a Disney friend of mine at his timeshare in southern California. Having someone else provide lodging and transportation made it an opportunity I just couldn’t turn down. This return to Disney got me motivated to revisit my website and start reorganizing and updating it.

My first major project was to update the layout of the old site so it could be viewed on modern devices like phones and tablets. Initial work has been started, but much is still to be done. My second major project was to go through all my photo archives and re-sort everything. I’ve done that with the Disneyland Resort photos so far, though I’m sure there is still much more work to be done.

I plan to use this site to comment on interesting videos and photos I have in my extensive collection. It seems my high-tech digital camcorder I took to the parks in 1999 now contains footage that is twenty years old. It will be fun looking back. My digital camera photos began in 1996, so we will get to explore a bit further back with those.

Welcome aboard!