I spent time this weekend migrating my 2011 blog posts from the old site design to the new static design. Despite it being monotonous work it was a fun stroll down memory lane. I wrote about a bunch of different topics that year and after the break, I discuss a few of the posts that were particularly interesting and impactful.

Welcome to the new, modernized, mobile-friendly aaronwest.net. I’ve been writing on the Internet for nearly 20 years in one form or another. My journey started in the early 2000s when I set up a virtual Linux server and blogged at trajiklyhip.com. After a few years, I acquired aaronwest.net and switched everything to the new domain and new blogging software. I still ran my own Linux server where I managed an Apache webserver, ColdFusion application server, and MySQL database backend. It…

For the past few months I’ve been planning on writing a post about the services that make this site possible. I’ve read these sorts of posts on other sites and they seem very marketing heavy. They’re often titled “sponsor post” or something equivalent. This post is different. I’m genuinely a fan (and customer) of all of these services and in most cases I pay for them monthly. After the break I discuss each service/app I rely on to power this site. I put each…

Last week I accomplished something I had been thinking about for at least a year, moving this blog to my own server. I had been hosting this site with a popular shared hosting provider for nearly four years and had not been happy for a long time. Picking a shared hosting provider in 2005 had been a pretty easy thing to do. I wasn’t too comfortable with managing an entire Linux server so having others take care of it while I simply managed and wrote content was a good choice.