I set up a photo gallery for this site. I added the photos I recovered from my old 10-year reunion site and am working on scanning my high school photos. As I type this I'm uploading thirtysomething photos from fall 1987 including some classroom shots, nerd day and the Haltom pregame activities.

I'm somewhat paranoid about serving photos of the flag, and I originally was going to require people to register to view the photos. Then I decided I'll just keep the search engines out of the photo section and let anyone who finds this site view them without logging in.

If you have photos you'd like to add, register in the gallery (the blog and photo gallery have different user/password systems), click the "Your Album" link in the upper-right and you'll have a gallery you can upload photos to. This is only for photos of interest to RHS Class of 1988, of course.

I stumbled across this site while looking for RHS info. This site is linked from RHS's General Information page.

I'm typing this as I register. It asks some basic questions, and then you get to choose to be a free member or paid member, but get this...the paid membership is $15 for life. Way better than that Classmates.com and Reunion.com monthly fee crap. Hmm, there are 15 registered alumni for our class. How come the cheap ones don't have registered people? Does our class like to spend money? Sheesh!

Okay, well phooey on this site as apparently you can't view any information without becoming a paid member. $15 for life sounded cool at first, but that's $1 per person you might possibly contact, so not such a good deal after all. Unless they happen to be the 15 people you really desperately wanted to contact.

This site just made it into a couple of the big search engines, so I was playing around to see where it was ranked and noticed there's an RHS entry in Wikipedia. It's only a stub, but it's there and had links to a couple of other class sites, so I added a link to this one as the Class of 1988.

If anyone's feeling encyclopedic feel free to extend the Wikipedia article about RHS. I'm not up to it at the moment.

Oh, and by the way this site doesn't seem very highly ranked yet. In fact I'm fairly confident I'm the only human who's read it so far. Oh well.

I noticed on Classmates.com there is a feature not only to search for people, but there's a counter that tells you how many times people have searched for you. Of course you have to pay to find out who's been searching for you. There are posts in the free forums asking "who's searching for me?"

I'm getting emails from Reunion.com saying someone's searching for my name within my age range, and they want me to pay to find out who. Big whoop, my name is "Jim Nelson", not all that uncommon, and their given age range is 31-41, so I deduce that they're not restricting it to my class and possibly not my school. And I'm supposed to pay to find out details? I guess my long lost classmates and I are just going to have to live with disappointment. Well, disappointment and $36 saved.

Most of the alumni/reunion sites I've been on have dating functions on the site. I find this rather humorous. If you didn't have luck the first time around, why go back to the same dating pool and try again? Sure I can think of a girl or two, but sheesh it's been like 18 years and I don't even know who they are anymore, and I'm certainly not the same person I was in high school. (And we're all better off for that!)

Oh well, whatever floats your boat I guess.

Admittedly I did pick up a girl at the 10-year reunion. Or more like she picked me up. But we didn't know each other back in school and just sort of clicked at the reunion gatherings. Didn't last, by the way. After the reunion gatherings and a couple of parties I think we lasted one more date. Such is my dating life. (It was my fault I'm sure...I was such a dweeb.)

Okay, going down the Google-ranked list of reunion sites, next is SchoolNews.com. It claims to be completely free. As I select RHS I notice the selection process is nearly identical for several sites I've done this on. It makes me wonder if it's a coincidence, or maybe they're using the same software or maybe there just aren't many methods to select a school.

This page is the sign-up for RHS.

This is the page for our class. Meh, only 4 people, including me. Apparently it pays to collect dues and advertise.

According to Reunion.com, RHS Class of 1988 reunion is being planned by Reunions Unlimited, and the contact is Kaye Brock.

It sounds fishy to me, though, because it's not like how the 10-year reunion was handled, there are no notes or details on the reunion.com page, and there is no listing on the Reunions Unlimited site.

If I recall correctly, the 10-year reunion was managed by a company called "Reunions by the Party People" and directed or coordinated with some of the senior STUCO staff of our class.

I did a Google search for (high school reunion), and reunion.com was the top result, coming in just above Classmates.com.

This page is the registration page for RHS. I'm registering as I type this. They seem to want me to pay money, but it looks like I don't have to, which is good because I'm really cheap.

Once you're logged in, this page is for RHS Class of '88.

Looks like they have 154 of our class registered at the site, and each has a profile, blog, photos and various other tidbits. I see quite a few familiar names. Contacting somebody requires a paid subscription, but it seems I can look at profiles, blogs and photos so far. It looks like I can reply to others' blog comments without a subscription. They also have a rudimentary messge board, but it's not specific to our class.

According to them, a reunion plan is in the works. I'll post that in a separate blog entry.

EDIT: Reunion.com, like Classmates.com, keep sending me email exclaiming that somebody viewed my profile or somebody searched for my name and offers a link for you to find out who. Of course you get taken to the subscription page. So expect to get badgered. The site itself doesn't seem to be quite as bad about ads as Classmates, but then again I'm blocking some ads and may not be seeing them all.

Even for our 10-year reunion the Birdville page had some reunion/alumni info on it. It has some neat-looking features now, but I know at least some of the info is horribly out of date. My phone, email and homepage shown there are obsolete and ancient.

• Birdville ISD
• Alumni/reunion link from bottom of page

MySpace is is a blog site with all sorts of community building functions. You've probably heard of it as it's very popular. It seems a bit spammy with the ads and email, though.

Users can choose their schools, and schools have their own forums, too. If you have a MySpace login then this is the Richland HS page.

EDIT: I came back to MySpace later and had much better results. Read about it here.