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Ten Year Anniversary

The Pacific Coast of Mexico, was started in December 1994 as The Pacific Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico by Tom Penick and expanded to include Jalisco and Colima in 1997. It is a collection of information about these areas obtained from a variety of sources. The web page continues to grow and now consists of about 800 HTML pages and 2000 images. The original URL was www.eden.com/~tomzap and after July 27, 2000, the URL became www.tomzap.com. You can find additional information in the About section.

Ten Years Ago

The internet has come a long way in ten years. At that time, HTML was less developed and the pages of the web looked much like this one. There were not a lot of formatting options. Most home monitors were 14". You may need to narrow your browser window to get that effect and make this page easier to read. And few graphics cards would display more than 256 colors. Businesses were just warming up to the internet and often even very large companies had little more than a brochure for a web page. Mexico's internet presence consisted mainly of web sites for educational institutions. The network in Mexico had been built with pesos allocated for education and so was not made available to the general population at that time. There was very little information about Oaxaca on the internet at the time, so I started building this web site.

The tomzap.com Community

Over the years, the web site has taken on a life of its own. A lot of readers keep coming back, especially to the Visitors' Comments. In Melaque, Jalisco, readers have formed an annual tomzap get-together. Mexico has made great strides in connecting its general population to the internet so now foreign visitors can interact with local residents in Mexico. I get a large volume of email now, and it is difficult to keep up with it.

A number of people have asked to advertise. Many of these are for alternative accommodations like condos, villas, rooms for rent. These are often an attractive alternative to staying in a hotel and the website has become a good way for guests to connect with the owners. Longtime advertiser, Vista World Travel, has helped many readers with the difficulty in arranging transportation and hotel packages for some of the destinations featured here which are not on the radar screen of every travel agent.

What is Next?

I plan to continue operating the site indefinitely. I will be adding more information, but probably not expanding to other states. Shortly I will be moving the web site to another server that can better handle the increasing activity.

Tom Penick
Webmaster
12/5/04

The Pacific Coast of Mexico

www.tomzap.com

Tom Penick: tom@tomzap.com