A new home: ayesh.me → aye.sh
Almost 10 years ago, I started my own personal web site, ayesh.me. It was my humble place to post my findings, photos, events, presentations, rants, and everything else.
10 years later, I have moved to a better and new personal web site at aye.sh, and this is my story of it.
Bedrock for many projects
ayesh.me was a bedrock for many of my projects. Seeing a small blog post get a lot of attention and interest lead me to "graduate" those ideas to individual web sites and projects, even to this date, most of them are alive!
One of my earliest projects was a simple site to generate unlocking codes for a few USB modems. This was when I wanted to remove the carrier-lock one of my own USB 3G modems had, and I posted how to do it for the same model. After receiving several messages to help others out, I created a small web site to calculate the code by themselves. A few weeks later, I even added a couple other brands to the mix. This site is still alive, and the unlock code algorithms are now outdated. It still gets a few thousand users a month.
Get IDM CC is another spin-off from ayesh.me. I posted a browser add-on and kept it updated as Firefox was in its rapid release phase and browser add-ons were getting quickly unsupported. What I started a series of blog posts moved into getidmcc.com, that I still occasionally update.
There are several other individual web sites and projects that such as HTTP2.Pro and DownloadGram that started from the inspirations and feedback from ayesh.me. It feels both wholesome and nostalgic to take a look at some of my earliest projects, that had humble beginnings.
Most recently, I migrated all my PHP-related posts (which were many!) to its own space at PHP.Watch.
They are not your "started from garage, and now we are Amazon" stories, but those simple and sometimes quite trivial work has a story behind that has brings a lot of myself forward.
Freelancing and Consulting
Blog posts and my presence on ayesh.me helped a lot for my freelancing career. I was freelancing for up until 2020 (almost 9 years!).
The gig economy usually works by the freelancer convincing the potential buyer that the freelancer can do the work, and do it well. There was nothing more convincing than a blog post written by the freelancer solving that very same.
While I'm slowly stepping down from my freelancing life, I know for a fact that those writings on ayesh.me helped me indirectly make a living and bring me the financial stability.
A blog post I wrote CloudFlare attracted staff at PacktPub, and even brought me as technical reviewer for a small book called Instant CloudFlare Starter.
If you are starting a freelancing/consulting career, I couldn't recommend more to start a blog and get to writing.
Test of Time
It is not uncommon that blog posts become irrelevant, outdated, and show the history of your writing style changes and your expertise in a subject.
3-4 years after I started the blog, I was severely demotivated to write, because my old blog posts were quite messy, and more often than not, were irrelevant. I used to write about Drupal, with Drupal 8 in the making, all those Drupal 6 and 7 posts were easily forgotten. I can see from my blog posts that I rarely posted anything after 2016 because I built-up unjustified expectations that I should only write blog posts that lasts the test of time, which is quite impossible to say the least.
My belief that content has to stand the test of time slowed me down, to a point that, I was discarded several of my old posts, and not write content as often as used. This was wrong, and my newer ventures like PHP.Watch will see more frequent content, often written about that things that might not matter in a few months.
Last of my Drupal Web Sites
ayesh.me was one of my very first Drupal 7 sites. Drupal 7 was released the same year I started this blog (2011), and it continues to be a supported version even today. It's an amazing effort by the community that simply refuses to die, but an EOL date for Drupal 7 is set.
I'm slowly completing my consulting projects, and majority of them were Drupal 6/7/8 sites. As I slowly shift gears to work on my projects, ayesh.me was my last web site. I'm all-in for PHP 8, Drupal 7 is currently not working at all with PHP 8. This was a bigger motivation for me to move on to Drupal 8/9, or simply rebuild the site.
aye.sh
I love domain-hacks, and I'm lucking to have a top-level-domain that perfectly suits my name, and have it up for grabs too!
.sh is the country code TLD for Saint Helena. Country code TLDs tend to be fairly well governed because more often than not, governments have less incentive and motivation to play tricks on registered domains. My previous domain .me belongs to the ccTLD of Montenegro, a country I happen to absolutely love too!
I purchased aye.sh a couple months back, and yesterday, I moved all most of blog posts, talks, and other content to a new site built brand-new!
- Zero JavaScript: The site does not use any JavaScript at all. Burger menu is purely CSS, and there are no other components that required any JS whatsoever.
- 100% in Google Lighthouse test on all counts.
- No analytics, tracking, or cookies. I previously used Google Analytics.
- All the content are written in MarkDown, that fits quite well with all my other publications.
- ayesh.me did not have any automated tests of its own. aye.sh has, and due to the modern code base, the tests run in just a few minutes.
There you have it; I migrated my 10-year-old Drupal site, a bedrock for many of projects, to a shorter domain, with performance improvements, no tracking, cookies, and with a fresh face. You are reading this post on my new site, and thank you for doing so!
Smile,
Ayesh.