Welcome to to traas.org
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.
Why am I here?
That's quite an interesting question. Chances are your arrival fell into one of the following categories:
News and personal updates...
This is the section for new updates about the website and minor points of my life. Should be updated at least weekly.
Man Food: Mac & Cheese
The presentation I'm giving tonight at Isaac's is on how to cook a delicious yet fool-proof mac & cheese. For those of you who weren't able to make it, or lost the print-outs I gave to you, here's the recipe:
The recipe contains a glossary of terms, which newer cooks might recognize. I ask all of you who have been participating in this lecture series to make this recipe -- it contains the keys to making many more dishes of varying level of impressiveness.
Cause for the beatification of Empress Zita of Austria
I've long held a devotion to Bl. Emperor Karl I, the last reigning Emperor of the Austria. A deeply religious man made Emperor due to the assassination of his cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand his prayers, example, and guidance is exactly what Europe needs in these bleak times.
There is now also a cause for his wife, the Empress Zita, who was a model mother and queen. More info is available at the New Liturgical Movement.
I've made a little sheet for my nightly devotions. I hope to update this regularly. I plan on mailing the organizations for the causes, asking if there are official Latin versions of the prayers.
Progeny
I'd like to introduce my first-born:
Miriam Elizabeth Traas. She's a beautiful and healthy baby girl born March 5th, 2009 at 10:31am. I've added
photos of her for all to see.
I apologize to all (most notably, my
wife), that I have not yet put up our wedding or honeymoon photos. We took fewer than 200 photos of Miriam, whilst I have over 3000 honeymoon/wedding photos to sort through. Also, my upload script is primitive at best.
Traas.org 3.0
Traas.org has actually been completely re-written using an open-source MVC framework called CodeIgniter. This has enabled me to further separate my presentation layer from my database, resulting in cleaner, more manageable code. It also takes a lot of the pain away from building/validating forms, uploading files, and clean URLs. In the clean URLs department, for example, the brewing equipment page of this site, the url used to be:
http://traas.org/page.php?pid=13
whereas now it's
http://traas.org/page/brewing_equipment
Much easier to remember.
Coming soon: RSS/ATOM feed for blog content and photos, dynamic sitemap.xml, and improved photo viewer. Some of the old features don't work yet, notably all the submission forms (such as for email, blog comments), because I haven't gotten to them yet.
Updates, finally
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.
Traas.org v1.8 released today
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.
You can now interact with traas.org: leave comments!
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.
Minor page upgrades that you won't notice!
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...
Page upgrade -- now with blog-like goodness
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?
Random recommended music feature added
If you know me, you know I love music. I'd rather go blind than deaf. Listening to music is a large portion of my reason for living, and I see it as the highest and most Godly of expressive artforms. So of course, I'd love to share my musical tastes with you. On the sidebar, I have a list of 5 albums randomly selected from my favorites, and it will change every time you visit traas.org. Click on it for a link to the CD on Amazon. That's where I get 90% of my music. Or view the full list of
my favorites.
Vacation photos from Italy
Well, if you care, there's my 700+ photos from
Italy. I'm not one of those people that will force all of my friends, relatives, and co-workers to sit through all of my pictures, so I created this page. Browse at your leisure. Or don't. No guilt. If you want larger versions of any photo (I have all of the at 1600x1200 or higher),
just ask.
