JonahEllison.com v6.0 — Not So Personal Anymore

This is my sixth "personal" website I've built in the past ten years. My first site used plain HTML files, then server-side includes (SSI), next ASP.NET/C#, and now finally, Drupal!

After much thought about the direction of my career as a web developer, I've come up with this roadmap:

1. Devote myself fully to Drupal.
   What is Drupal? The most popular and successful open-source content management system and framework (sites that run off Drupal: whitehouse.gov, mtv.co.uk, michaeljackson.com, plus hundreds of thousands more)!

   After experimenting--sometimes involuntary--with ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET, Plone/Zope, ColdFusion, WordPress, Zend, and numerous other web technologies, I keep coming back to the Drupal framework. Drupal has a vibrant community and isn't going away--every year it grows larger and more successful. If you're a PHP/MySQL developer, learn Drupal, as jobs are plentiful and usually pay well. I can see myself doing this for a long time, and enjoying it.

2. Establish the personal brand of "Jonah Ellison."
   Google results for my name and show a scattered online identity with no focus. Time to change this. My personal website has become less relevant as I grow older. No one visits it anymore and most of the "personal" content was created during college. (I wrote my Making Kids Puke essay as a college freshman!) I've gotten rid of my httpremix.com webdev blog and merged it with JonahEllison.com, creating a new website dedicated to web development. By driving more traffic to my personal domain, I hope to build a reputation for myself, which should help open more doors for me.
3. Update this blog on a regular basis.
   My goal is 2-3 new articles per month. I have several fun projects I'm working on that should hopefully draw some traffic as well. Since you've already read this far, you might as well subscribe to my RSS feed! ;)

Technical details about this site

This site is running Drupal 6 on a $30/month Xen VPS host with 512MB RAM.

The theme is a custom Zen subtheme with liberal use of CSS3 curved borders (border-radius).

Optimizations

• Pressflow — Well-maintained Drupal fork focused on performance.

• Authcache — My contrib Drupal module that serves cached pages directly from memcached without hitting the database. An Ajax call is performed after the page is loaded to update the stats counter (I bet you didn't notice!).
• nginx ("engine x") — Lightweight webserver built for speed. (Why I Ditched Lighttpd for Nginx)