History of Amerasian World About

The original purpose of the site reflected on my Amerasian Identity.

This website's original content focused on Amerasians. Then it progressed to a Central Eurasian personal website. Learn more about Amerasians.

History of AmerasianWorld.com website

This site is 23 years old now. It started as Salaam Central Asia before being renamed Amerasian World. I started web development with this site and further improved as the years went on.

The old AmerasianWorld.com site entirely in XHTML 1.1
For fourteen years, this site used the above XHTML 1.1 design.

Technical History of this site

  • 2000: Salaam Central Asia was first developed and hosted at Yahoo GeoCities. I was new to web development and was scared to touch any HTML.
  • 2000: The website was migrated to Microsoft FrontPage and hosted for free at Ummah.com. A Dutch friend sent me my first copy of FrontPage to the US. FrontPage helped create my first thumbnails.
  • 2002: Website migrated to Macromedia Dreamweaver. My skills started to improve. I use the WYSIWYG user interface with the actual HTML code for the first time.
  • 2003: Salaam Central Asia was renamed to AmerasianWorld.com after Ummah.com went down. I then bought my first domain and web hosting (first with Nexpoint and later Anhosting). I remember being scared the first time and asking some Computer Science friends for help.
  • 2004: XHMTL 1.1 version developed with Quanta Plus. The XHTML 1.1 version would last for 14 years until Google announced they would not support XHTML 1.1 anymore. The Wayback Machine could easily archive all the XHTML 1.1 sites. The first high point of my web developing career. Validating XHTML 1.1 was not easy. I did many times. It was the way to develop until HTML 5 was released.
  • 2011: The website moved to my LEMP stack with Linode. For the first time, I managed my full stack LAMP system. I was using CentOS at the time.
  • 2018: The website migrated to WordPress, moved to my LAMP stack with DigitalOcean, and managed by ServerPilot.io. I migrated to LAMP after a plugin got hacked twice. It took down so many of my WordPress sites. I started to hate WordPress at this time.
  • 2019: Introduced to Jamstack by Daniel at Evo Strength and Fitness. Within two years, I started to enjoy developing websites again. I was introduced to Jekyl by Pratik Sinha in 2011.
  • 2021: Website migrated from WordPress to Ghost hosted on my MERN stack with DigitalOcean. The transfer of the site did not go so well. Hence, after about a month, I decided to move the entire site to Next.js.
  • 2021: Website migrated to Next.js from Ghost and hosted at Netlify. Cloudinary hosts the photos that helped the migration move faster. It took me five full days, but I did it.
  • I customized the colors of this site using the hexadecimal forms from the flags of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
  • May 26, 2021: Site relaunched to Netlify and automated with Slack.
  • August, 2021: I needed to update the Next.js version that now included ESLint.
  • January 23, 2022: My new blog is online at: https://kevinmatsunaga.com running on Ghost.
  • Updated the site with a new Meta description to help improve the SEO for this website. Much of the content was not showing up on Google. I realized that the meta description used was the same for all pages.
  • April 26, 2022: I migrated the site to SvelteKit. SvelteKit changed their page routing and the migration did not go well so updates stopped.
  • January 26, 2023: I migrated the site to Astro. I like SvelteKit, but since this site is 100% static, Astro was the better option. I also decided to call the site to Amerasian World versus AmerasianWorld for SEO purposes.

Current

I plan to add the remaining content to this site including East Asia and Southeast Asia. This means a revamp of the navigation bar above.