Back in 2010 when I was still in college, I found myself worried that I wasn't learning much of anything, and over the course of a winter break learned more about webdev than I did in what would be four years of college. I actually learned PHP and mysql instead of copy/pasting examples provided by a professor to adjust to pull data we needed for whatever coursework we had.
I did this by making a site called tf2tags, where folks could submit names/descriptions for Team Fortress 2 items which was still a recently new addition to the game, and had a thriving enough community for people to ask "Hey what should I name my Gunslinger?"
I eventually recreated (and incredibly badly, like wow) the site using Python and Django and that's pretty much where I am today. But while a lot of shared hosting providers would give you access to PHP and a database, running Python wasn't really a thing on them, and so I found the babiest VPS plan on HostGator and was in charge of my first server. I called it Minisentry.
That site's been dead for many years now. (But it took off enough to get more than 100,000 submissions! And a successor tags.tf eventually made by somebody else eventually got made too).
As I moved on to other projects, Minisentry lived on, and I kept the name despite the actual hosting provider changing a few times, the latest being Linode which got acquired by Akamai and recently cranked up the prices so I have once again jumped ship.
But since tf2tags itself is no more I've decided a name change was in order. Also because it got awfully confusing during the transitional periods to have two servers named Minisentry and have to double-check which one I was on all the time.
This is just a rambly post with no real point, but I wanted to commemorate the end of the Minisentry era.
