OK, that may seem a bit dramatic, but the creation of this site truly is a full circle moment. In the 25 years I have been creating and designing websites, it never occurred to me to bring all the different sites together under one name. But here it is. Welcome to AlansWorld, my little corner of the world where I can create, design, test, and play as it relates to topics of interest to me.
I have spent the majority of this weekend laying the groundwork for two of my interests… trading cards and fanfiction. And while I don’t collect trading cards or write fanfiction myself these days, there are still people out there who do.
AlCo Cards is a site to showcase not just my baseball card collection from when I was younger (I have over 400 different Jose Canseco cards!) but also a place for my son, Connor, to be able to display his ever growing Pokémon collection along with his recent Justin Jefferson additions.
Efanfiction.org is a re-birth of sorts, as I used to have the largest ER fanfiction website (ertvonline) in the early 2000’s which grew into efanfiction.net. Sadly, both ERTVOnline and eFanfiction.net were discontinued as casualties of real world events. I never stopped thinking about reviving a fanfiction site of some sort.
The Coon White Family History website is the result of thousands of hours of research spanning three decades. I still work on it occasionally when the research bug bites me. In the process of gathering supporting documentation, I have found hundreds of family that I would never have known existed. With the exception of being the father to my kids, it is perhaps my greatest achievement and perhaps my lasting legacy when I am no longer here. There are currently 6,890 individuals in the family tree, each with their own unique history and stories.
Few know that I was laid off from my role as a mortgage underwriter in May, 2022 after being in the financial industry for almost 30 years. In the six months that followed when I was unemployed, I sent out hundreds of resumes. There had to be a way to make my resume accessible to companies that I didn’t even know had openings, so I created a website to showcase my experience in the hopes that a company finds it and reaches out to me about opportunities in addition to sending out resumes. The resume can be easily viewed, printed, and downloaded.
My bucket list is short. I’ve been blessed to do many of the things I have wanted to do. If you know anything about me, you know I LOVE to travel. Along the way there have been some amazing experiences (and photo ops). As a child, we did not travel. It wasn’t until the day before my 29th birthday that I took my first plane ride when I went to Orlando, FL where I met some amazing people from the support group I joined online after my first divorce. To commemorate the 20 year anniversary, I am again going to travel to Orlando, FL two days before my 49th birthday. It again comes less than a year after my second divorce. I am 15 states away from visiting all 50. Kind of a play on words, myquestforfifty.com not only references traveling, but also referencing hitting the half century mark in age, which will happen in 2025. It will be the repository for all those travel pictures (and maybe some leading up to that milestone birthday!).
Sometimes you just have to hang on to childhood as long as you can. I remember saving money from my first job in the late 1980’s to be able to buy a Lego castle set. Through the years, I bought random sets to build but it wasn’t until 2018 or 2019 when I really went all in. As of this writing, I have 114 sets, 356 minifigs, and at least 128,687 pieces. My largest and most prized inanimate object is the Titanic set, comprised of 9,090 pieces (and proudly displayed in my living room). That gave rise to legosphere.com. I haven’t started work on it yet, but it will eventually become a photo gallery of the sets I own.
And finally, my oldest child, Sam, graduated from high school this year and is preparing to head off to college in the fall. As much as you try to prepare for this day to come, as a parent it is both difficult and bittersweet. I could not be more proud of the young woman she is continuing to grow into. To celebrate her graduation, and help with party planning, I created a graduation website for her. It has since been dismantled, but I will most likely hold onto the domain name and use it again when she graduates college.
So yeah, it’s all come full circle. And I couldn’t be more proud.
