AidanMontare.Net is, appropriately, a website all about me, Aidan Montare. So…

Who is Aidan Montare?

I wish I knew for sure. (Don’t worry, this won’t be that kind of blog. I had enough of philosophy in ninth grade English class.)

I like music, Linux, command lines, Raspberry Pi’s, encryption, privacy, airplanes, space, radio, building things, and learning (mostly through the book of knowledge)

Things I don’t like: software that only runs on Windows, people who think Wikipedia is the worst reference ever, social media, most things cloud (unless they are open source and you can run them yourself, which is just plain awesome!)

A more informative and updated autobiography of myself will at some point be available under the About Me section of this website.

Why did I create this website?

Because I wanted to.

A few months ago I decided I wanted a website to host my projects.

What projects?, you may ask. That part is still a work in progress. For now, my main project has been building this site, so I haven’t done much else worth sharing. But if you look through the navigation menu, you can see some of the things I am interested in and would like to share in the future.

Since this was going to be my website, I decided that I wanted to build the website myself. Not just the pages, but the entire server.

But I had never built a web server before. Being a security-conscious user, I didn’t just want to spin up a live server on the internet and start building things, leaving the system open to attack until I figured out how to secure it. So, I forced myself to plan ahead. Using VirtualBox, I created a virtual machine and host-only network. Then, for several weeks, I build my website on my own computer, making note of all the steps I took to configure and secure it. I crashed Firefox with all the tabs I had open as I researched website security, design, and coding.

At the end, I had a fairly long checklist to follow when I built the actual server. For those of you who are interested, I will be providing a cleaned up version of these notes under the Web Development portion of this website at some point in the future. Feel free to use it to help you create your own website (see my website policies for licensing of my content on this site).

Who is this website for?

People interested in the same things that I am. This is a personal website, but I don’t expect many people to care about my personal life (and being privacy-concious, I don’t intent on sharing much of it). But I do plan on doing lots of things in the future, and so this website will provide hosting for my research and projects. If I attempt something, and finish wishing someone had explain how to do it well in the first place, then I will try to write what I learned here. Most of my projects will also have pages here, so you will be able to download code, read guides, etc.

Back to Work

My site still needs a lot of work to be done, specifically in the area of content (being a technical person, I enjoy building websites more than actually writing on those sites). Over the next few months, I hope to fill in the areas of this site which are currently lacking. And though this is not specifically a blogging site, I hope to write from time to time to share interesting things or just improve my writing skills.

For now, though, this is the product of my work. I hope you enjoy it.