31 May 2022
Here’s my first post of the website. I figured the first project I should try to tackle is actually creating a home base for all of my other projects – so here I am.
For a little bit of background, I was inspired by, and inadvertently took the minimalist look of, the websitetinyprojects.dev. If you haven’t checked out that site, I highly recommend it – he’s got something fun going on.
However, unlike him, I’m not from a web dev background. Sure, I have some computer and data science experience, mostly through the lens of Jupyter notebooks, but I did not (and still do not) understand much of anything when it comes to the web.
But hey – fuck it, right? Let’s do it anyways.
Disclaimer
In no way, shape, or form should this be a guide. Please, please, please do not take my word for anything you are about to read. All I can do is document how I approached this whole thing and where I landed.
For now, it seeeems to be functional, and I’m happy with that. When it stops being functional for my needs, I’ll revisit it!
Let’s hit it.
Tl;dr, I did the following:
The domain part was easy – head on over todomains.google, pay Papa G twelve bucks, and the domain of your dreams is yours (unless it’s taken, of course).
Next up was how to actually build the thing and let me tell ya —
All right, where do I even begin? It’s a mess. I’m sure this is just beating a dead horse by now, but holy shit I was struggling.
Now, with that out of the way. I had a few criteria I wanted this framework to meet:
The reason I chose to use a framework at all is I simply don’t trust myself to maintain a folder full of html files and hope it all works out – I know myself too well to play into that game.
So, one of my temp projects (which I will document and add to the site at some point), was a startup idea that was built with the Django framework. It worked great and was definitely a contender when deciding what to use here, however I opted not to because it actually had too much functionality for what I wanted and it seemed too over the top.
Along the journey, I discovered this idea of “the Jamstack”, and quickly read a new phrase that looked interesting: “Site Generator”. So, of course, I clicked it.
First up on the list of generators was Next.js. I sort of already discounted it for my purposes simply because of the .js part, but I checked it out anyways. Upon first look, it immediately made sense why websites have felt like they all look the same nowadays – big, bold, sans-serif font to pull together a simple, clean, look. I perused the documentation, and concluded it was indeed overkill. [1]
I went down the list, after having similar experiences looking into Hugo and Gatsby, until I hit Jekyll. Granted, I didn’t know jack about ruby or gems or anything like that, but the idea that it worked really well with Github Pages and I didn’t have to go through the hassle of figuring out deployments or whatnot again, made it a really nice sell.
So, I took a crack at it.
I followed Jekyll’sstep-by-step tutorialto get the website setup and so I can become familiar maneauvering around. I’ll admit, I thought the simplicity of the process was rather refreshing, and the combination of writing posts with markup and using liquid tags seemed really intuitive.
So, I wrote the “Hello World”, made the same posts about a bunch of fruit, and was satisfied at how it worked.
With the simple website completed and looking like it works, I pushed the code to the repo I will be using for my Github Pages. I tried to follow the tutorial from Github, but found that it didn’t matter – a simple push to the repo after the Jekyll step-by-step worked great! (Side note: I dislike any and all Github documentation, or Microsoft documentation for that matter, it’s so overly verbose and confusing to navigate for me. But that’s a rant for another time.)
Last was to add my custom domain. I first needed to add the apex domain redirect, so I followed theGithub tutorialon that. After that, I needed to add the www subdomain, so I followed theinstructionson that one.
After a bit of refreshing, I was successfully able to navigate to a page with my domain that said “Hello Worl” becuase I forgot to type “d” – felt like a great beginning.
[1] I have since learned much more about these tools since my initial writing and understand that CSS is a defining characteristic of the look and feel of these pages. I talk a bit more about what I learned in a later blog post