From my garage to an acquisition, my news-based, educational website took me on an amazing journey.

I began my career as a photojournalist. My photo of Muhammad Ali appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and on Saturday Night Live — twice.

Then I spent twenty years as a design consultant with my company, Brass Tacks Design, putting new faces on newspapers from New England to New Zealand. In 1992, I was honored by the Society for Newspaper Design with a Judges’ Special Recognition for the Overall Design of five different newspapers in a single year.

To reach my clients in the U.S, I flew my own plane – similar to the plane Tom Cruise flew in “American Made.”

When newspapers tanked in the mid-2000s, I began developing websites. My first attempt was a mashup of YouTube and Craigslist — video classifieds — called realpeoplerealstuff.com.

This site did not succeed.

In 2008, I developed a news-based, educational website — think “Weekly Reader” but online, updated daily with multiple stories, photos and comments, and interactive with a moderated social media component.

This site was sold in 2014 to a large educational institution in Washington.

Since then, I have pursued my dream as described by Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour-Work-Week:

“The Four-Hour-Work-Week doesn’t have to mean four months on a sailboat in the Caribbean — unless that’s your dream.”

You can reach Alan at [email protected] (that’s “.co” not “.com’)