You have arrived at traas.org -- the personal home page of Aaron Traas. This site is ever growing, containing information about Aaron's interests, trade, and freakish love of technology.
Who is this Aaron Traas fellow, anyway? That's quite a difficult question. In short, Aaron Traas is a human male with two eyes, one nose, one or more skin cells, a pair each of arms and legs, an extreme appetite for cheese. His hobbies include computer programming, cooking, and juggling mummified cats. He is rumored to have undergone extensive ninja training. He likes swords, particularly ones that are very shiny. He's a big fan of progressive rock groups such as Dream Theater, Rush, Jethro Tull, and Wierd Al. He rather enjoys long moonlit strolls on the beach.
That's quite an interesting question. Chances are your arrival fell into one of the following categories:
This is the section for new updates about the website and minor points of my life. Should be updated at least weekly.
This site has been largely underutilized over the last year. I got engaged, married, 2 new jobs, and started brewing beer. These are finally all documented. I now have the brewing section on the sidebar, which will document my brewing experiments as well as my ever-developing philosophy of brewing. Also, for the first time since 2006, I actually added photos. Photos from the wedding and honeymoon are coming later... there's just so many to go through. 
I just updated the traas.org codebase and deployed it to the production web server. What's new? Well, dynamic everything. 100% of the content from traas.org is pulled from the database, and is easily editable. That's why there's now many, many spelling and punctuation corrections. Also, we now have support for all kinds of AJAXy features, the only one of which functions is the button next to the "Music I recommend" group, which refreshes the random list of five albums when you click on it. Coming soon are recipes and my own rantings. Please look through the site, and try to break it. If you find anything wrong, please comment below.Finally... I've been working for weeks to lay the foundations for this, but now there are blog-style comments on all of the news entries! The database design has been done for ages, and the comment rendering has worked. It was just a matter of a submission form... which is now completed. Now, click on the "comments" or "read more" link on each entry to see the comments others have left.Yup... I fixed a few bugs in the site code. First, I noticed that robots are traversing my site, and screwing up the metrics I'm taking, so I added a robots.txt. I'm not expecting this to work as some shady organizations ignore the settings of this file, but it should cut down on some unneccesary traffic. Second, after reading this article, I realized that though my documents all parsed as valid XHTML 1.1, the benefits of such are nil unless I actually have the HTTP server pass the document to XML-aware browsers as MIME-type "application/xhtml+xml". Instead, apache was sending it as "text/html", which made tells the browser to look at the document as "tag soup", and tolerate all kinds of quirks in CSS and non-well-formedness. Click "more" below for more details...I've added a dynamic news feature that's not completely unlike a blog in terms of function. No user comments... yet. I need to build a nice, clean, spam-proof system for that. But nonetheless, I will be adding regular content to this section. This site is really coming along... it's about time. I've had the domain for how many years?
