Finally I Have A Website
I had been wanting to have a personal website for a long time now. At first I wanted to use it as my software development portofolio at the time, but as a college student, I didn’t think that I would have enough resource to buy custom domain and to host it. I also felt that I might not have the time to maintain it, and it seemed like it’s gonna take a lot of effort. Basically all the standard excuses for procrastination.
Not knowing how to do it is not one of them though. I have set up websites and deployed several web applications before. The first website I have set up is when my friend paid me to create a website for his real-estate business. It was a rather simple WordPress website with a custom domain. I have also built several webapps from ground up, using backend and frontend frameworks. So I was quite familiar with basic web development stacks. But perhaps a tad bit too familiar, because I imagined that creating and maintaining a personal website would also take that much effort. So, yeah, I didn’t get to work on it and kept delaying for years.
That was more than a decade ago, though. Fast forward to last year, I was bored and somehow decided to start looking for simple (and cheap) ways to set up a website again. But this time I had a more specific image of how I would like it to be in mind. I wanted something simple and easy to maintain. Static web pages would be sufficient. I also didn’t want to put too much effort on configuration, UI/UX, etc.; I wanted to focus more on the content instead of the medium.
Having that in mind I stumbled upon Hugo.
Hugo is one of the most popular open-source static site generators and it’s the world’s fastest framework for building websites, the landing page said. What made me decide to use Hugo is its content management. A page is just a markdown file in Hugo, so creating a page is just creating a markdown file for it. No complicated dashboards. The routing is also straightforward; it mirrors the path of the file on disk. It also supports themes, so I don’t need to spend excessive hours to make my website not look ugly. I can just pick a theme, customize a bit, and jump right into making the content.
So I jumped in and created a new git repo, followed the quickstart guide, picked a theme that I liked, stripped all of the features of the themes that I didn’t think I would use for now, and created a test page to see how it looks. And there it goes, the site was up and running on my localhost.
Perfect.
Now I just need to figure out where I would host the website. Actually, I have researched some options before and considering Fly.io for the hosting and Namecheap for the registrar. But at least I’ve got it running for now, so decided to wrap it up and continue later.
Turned out that “later” was a week ago, like, 9 months after that. Yeah, my timespan of doing things is a bit long (even this post took a week from I started writing to I posted it) . Anyway, I picked up from where I left off by browsing the TLD and checking which domain names are available. I ended up choosing Cloudflare registrar since I recently came to know of its existence, and it’s relatively cheap, and well, it’s Cloudflare. I also learned recently that I could host static sites using Cloudflare Pages for free forever, so naturally I went with that.
I found the name that I wanted, bought the domain, followed the guide from Cloudflare Pages for Hugo, set up the DNS records in the dashboard and my site is up and accessible through the domain in around 30 minutes (it took that long since I was not completely sure if it’s that simple and was reading the docs to understand how stuffs work). I was a bit surprised that it was this easy and cheap to set up your own website. It took me around $70~$80 for the domain and hosting of my friend’s simple WordPress site back then.
The site is up now so I just need to fill it with content. Even though at the first I wanted it to be my software development portofolio, I think I will just fill it with random blog posts now. I kinda like writing but I have never really attempted to write consistently. Well, actually, I tried once, a few years ago. I wrote about a case for writing consistently and posted it on Medium here, which I ironically failed doing. That was my first and only writing on Medium.
I will try again, though.