Building this website (from scratch)
September 2022
I had the wish of having a personal website for quite a while. This meant however that I needed to think about a few things:
- A domain-name,
- How to create the website,
- Things like hosting etc.,
- Which content it will have,
- Creating actual content.
Starting
Just as with most things, this is the most difficult part. (Just as the writing of this post, for which the finishing date is much later than the date I started writing). I know I did not want to have a Wordpress-like website, as the flexibility is often limited there (or you probably pay a lot). Furthermore, I did not want a fancy-pancy website either way, plus most websites that have dynamic/interacting elements require a server that hosts the website. As I do not have a server, and I did not want to pay a monthly fee to host something I don't need anyway, I looked for so-called static websites.
Researching time
After some Google searches and some YouTube videosI used this playlist, I found that there exist static website builders. This is a software framework that uses an XML-file and a collection of Markdown documents as input to generate a quasi-dynamic static website for you, which you can host using free services. It is actually rather simple and easy to use, and a lot of professional site builders make use of this framework. The building frameworks that I came across are "HUGO" and "jekyll", but there probably exist a lot more. Once you generated your website using one of these frameworks, you can deploy it and hence host it for free via services as netlify. This all seemed rather convenient.
Initial progress
With this gathered knowledge I started with a lot of enthusiasm. I choose some templates I liked from the HUGO website and started tweaking them to my liking. However, after playing with it for a while, there were still some things I did not like. And I did not know enough of the frameworks themself to adjust them to my needs (and I also did not have the time to learn this). So, I was at a crossroad. Shall I settle for a template I do not like 100%? Or shall I build my own website myself, from scratch, with the HTML-knowledge I have/had from high-school?
I found that the one and only ultimate challenge was to make my own website in HTML and CSS from scratch.
Building an HTML website
Once I made the decision to do this, the feeling of regret already started to creep upon me. Luckily, one of my best friends got to the same challenge as I have now a few years ago (although, he is an IT'er, so not so much of a challenge). So, this allowed me to have a starting point and take some inspiration from his website (currently offline again). So, with an index.html and style.css-file the adventure began.
Getting something online
Next to having the website built in HTML, I also needed to get it somehow online. I quickly figured that you could use GitHub with GitHub Pages to host your static website (for free) without too much trouble. This made the whole process even nicer, as I could just modify and test the website locally and push it to the GitHub repository when I was satisfied. GitHub Pages itself then accounted for the 'putting-it-online' part of the process. Therefore, I made a small under-construction-page to put online, which looked like this:
The downside of procrastinating is that you forget how you got this all working... To be continued...