Two Decades of Tech Tinkering

This page documents the evolution of my website over the years — from early static HTML hosted on Yahoo! Tripod, through experiments with PHP, WordPress, Blogspot, and Hugo, to today’s Astro-powered setup. It’s a mix of tech milestones and personal moments that shaped the site.

2000 Oct

Domain Registered

This domain is a self-sponsored birthday 🎁. Registered on Friday the 13th. Honestly, I did not know about paraskevidekatriaphobia or triskaidekaphobia those days it was just a weekend for me. This is called fear of 13 you can read about more ... Still remember the late rainy afternoon in Pleasanton, C.A. when I worked briefly for Foglight / Quest.

2000 Dec

First Hosting

The website was initially hosted on Yahoo!'s (*Lycos*) free hosting called santm.tripod.com with static pages. Moved on to shared hosting as creating static pages was no fun. You have to track every small change, and I was not using any framework in those days.

2001 Feb

LAMP

Started few small php pages. Those shared hosting was always slow as never spent too much on the personal hosting. In this process learned basic of PHP, MySQL and Apache I was a master in those days. Started to host pictures with codex.galleryproject.org ; long old defunct project now

2002 Nov

From me to We

Became we, and the tag lined for the site changed to -- Aashiyana of Pamela Santanu

2003 Feb

Moving to Paris

We moved to Paris from sunny California leaving behind friends who became an extended family with time. A new journey to explore Paris and Europe.

2004 March

Mambo, Drupal

Before Wordpress ; these were our knight in shining armour for CMS in PHP those days.

2005 Summer

Moved to Wordpress

Started to use WordPress and it was fun to learn about wordpress theme, separating content from design. It was a good journey for a while but again i had to had my personal shared hosting and with all that it was not that super cool. Build few sites for friends as side hustle

2006 Sep

Moved back to India

From Paris to the maximum city known as Mumbai. It was a extremely difficult transition even though we have very good family support.

2007 June

Moved to Blogspot

Moved Google's blogspot with custom domain. While it is a great tool for blogging the template choices are very limited and can never trust those free templates with many hidden codes.

2008 Jan

Aarush

A new journey started

2008 May

Moved Bangalore

Moved to Bangalore, the garden city of India. Well the trees were in decline still found many who are now only in our memories.

2010

Not much blogging

With rise of social media connecting with friends and family is very easy and the blog section show drastic reduction. It was still getting occasional update but Facebook, Google Photos, Instagram became primary mode to in touch with friends and family. Hope to write up the travel diaries as much as we can.

2020

Static Site

With global pandemic, working from home. Got some free time in the lock-down. And that is when came to know about Hugo content generator. It was again a new learning to understand how to migrate from Google Blogspot. But looks like it is not that difficult at all. Now back to static hosting with Hugo. The theme is a simple, minimalistic & responsive build on Bulma Framework made by me. The hosting now moved to GitHub pages.

2023

Astro

🚀 Now all is running with Astro, tailwind and firebase