photos.ALBj.net

This was my first General Conference Session experience, and outside of the U.S. to boot! As a Florida communication worker, I was recruited by the North American Division (NAD) communication office to manage an independent web site covering the Session specifically from NAD perspective. Although the web site's original location is long since eradicated, I kept a copy of the entire site just for fun reminiscing purposes. You can see it at session2000.albj.net. I had long been wanting to add a Flickr photo album of my experience at the Toronto Session, but I didn't want to use the tiny, scaled-down copies of photos from the web site (it was a rare sight to encounter a 1024x768 computer monitor in those days!). I thought the original photos were long lost, but I discovered them in February 2020. I did snap a few of the photos, most notably the CN Tower trip and most of the exhibit booths, but I did so as a member of the pool of photographers covering the Session for the NAD. Therefore, I officially assign photo credit for this entire album to the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists. Specific to the NAD team, in addition to myself, were Nadine Dower (NAD photo coordinator), Sandra Blackmer, Ron Quick, Glenn Mitchell, Gary Waterhouse, and Nathan Zinner. Other photos were provided from the plethora of GC photographers. Caption information for nearly all these photos is paraphrased from the original web site I created. PS - web site development was a MUCH different process back in 2000. Everything was hand-styled. No master stylesheets, no PHP, and only very rudimentary JavaScript involving link targeting and popup windows (a feature that didn't used to be blocked by most browsers and wasn't yet considered bad design). Blogs weren't really even a thing yet, so there was no feasible mechanism for publishing individual stories as soon as they were available. Essentially, I built a new home page every evening using content that was gathered throughout the day. As I updated the site with the day's new home page, the former pages were added to an index on the left side links. In spite of the work, it was a really fun experience.