The following is the text of the Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope opening scroll:

Episode IV, A NEW HOPE It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy….

GalaxyFarAway.com is 7 years old this week. Back in 1998 I set it up on a Tripod.com location that is still active; I used to call it TGFFA for The Galaxy Far, Far Away and it used to look something like this. In the summer of 1999, the summer of Episode I, I bought this domain name and set up the site around it. I gained a staff most of whom are no longer in touch. I also set up Pod Race Arena as a Star Wars magazine- a GFA spin-off. On the first birthday of GFA, we had this funky, fake, bizarre Star Wars party. Or at least we said we did!

Over the years, the amount of time I could afford to spend here has diminished, but barring some catastrophic event, the site and its content shall remain. And I shall be back with updates as often as I can. Since the Star Wars universe has shrunk (both online and off), there are fewer places to get your fix. I promise GalaxyFarAway.com will always be one of them. Thanks for visiting.

While there are tons of people who surf the internet in search of Star Wars mp3s, midis, sound clips, videos and jpegs; a lot of people would just like to find new and cool Star Wars stuff on the internet. To that end, I present to you two tools:

• Flickr : Here you can find a community around photographs. Upload your own, view others’, comment and search. The most fun part are the discussions and the tags. For example, here are all the most recent pictures tagged as starwars and the most interesting. You can even subscribe to RSS feeds (What is RSS?) per tag, user or comments. Here are all the pictures I’ve tagged as ‘starwars’. It’s a whole lot of fun.


• Del.icio.us : Del.icio.us is a flickr for bookmarks. Imagine a place where you could search and surf through other people’s bookmarks- that’s del.icio.us. The advantage is that it is a self-organized and pre-approved internet. Just as with flickr, here are some of the things tagged ‘starwars’ that people are bookmarking. And the most popular tagged ‘starwars’. It’s a great way to keep track of what people are up to on the internet and join in yourself as well.