I’ve tried multiple times to setup up a website. It has been a PITA for me every single time. There are multiple reasons for this.
The very first language I programmed was the BASIC programming language. I was in cloud nice I was in the group that was tasked with making a couple of demos for the science fair. I remember us cycling to a quite far place 3km approx, it was far for a 5th or 6th grade ‘me’ to meet a guy, maybe a college graduate. I was mesmerized to see a computer with a color monitor yes, we had only monochrome monitors at school. That is the very first time I’m seeing a color monitor. I was awe-struck when I saw BASIC’s graphics drawing colored circles and squares. The picture of a pink circle is etched in my brain and I’ll take it to the grave with pleasure. We got some tips from him to create a graphics demo for our science fair. I vaguely remember creating multiple silly demos for a science fair in our school. Among the 5 or 6 demos we made, the two demos I remember are a Pac-man like character chasing a dot and a program that shows a billboard when there is lightning etc… 😆 ya lighting… why not?
The only thing I remember is, it was hard. I’ve no idea why the computer is doing what it is doing. The billboard was planned to be something else, but due to some reason, I had some flashing like effect that I couldn’t get rid of. Due to time constraints and everything, I settled for it and built a story around it as a billboard with lighting and stuff… LOL. That Pac Man like thing was the satisfying one 😊
Fast forward a few years, I was learning VB6 in a computer center next to my home. Then out of interest I went ahead and learned C using Turbo C++ IDE. The point here is, I got used to the color coding and basic functionalities provided by these IDEs.
Later in college, I was introduced to java and html](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML). I hated them right there just because there was no IDE. I hated writing programs in notepad for java, then compiling them in the command prompt and mapping the error to my code (no double click or keystrokes to do it!!!). To top all these inconveniences, there was no line number in notepad then, and I dint bother to check if it can be enabled or not. The whole working style bothered me and I just hated it. I couldn’t overcome my hatred for java and html for a very long period and I just didn’t learn anything related to web development then. Even simple web programs look very complex to me.
With this background, I tried to set up a website for myself and had a horrible experience. By that time, the only thing I could do with ease was to buy a domain name. I kept it in my possession for several years without ever trying to set it up. If at all I tried, I never succeeded. Eventually, I will give up in a week or so. Html, PHP, CSS, js etc… I fiddle with everything without knowing their purpose. Altogether, I think I would’ve lost around 50$ to AWS, DigitalOcean and Vultr trying to host my website. I even had my domain up on GitHub Pages. I needed some control over my website and the name; GitHub Pages dint serve my purpose and hence I wasn’t impressed.
The next important thing I expected was to have a custom theme as I wished. I should be able to write my content in markdown only. Even before stumbling into the blog that made me set up the website, I fell in love with this Vulkan tutorial which uses markdown for content. I fiddled around with daux.io, which the Vulkan tutorial is using to generate the website from and failed at it. In a nutshell, these are the basic requirements I was looking for:
- markdown content
- the theme that I can customize
How did I succeed after all these failed endeavors?
A couple of weeks back, I was reading a blog post on some graphics stuff. I checked the about section only to find that he has hosted it in NFSN. The name nearlyfreespeech caught my attention. Did some quick research on the hosting service and was happy with the info I could gather from different blog posts and some hacker news threads. From the short description, I understood that these are something that I was looking for. He was using Jekyll to generate the website from markdown. There was a link to a post on the steps involved. It looked super easy. So I jumped right into it, searched for a Jekyll theme, added content, generated a website, created an account in NFSN and pushed stuff.
Damn! I hit a wall. The ruby version in NFSN was a bit older and one of the gems failed to install. I tried to install a previous version and likewise, I kept modifying versions of many gems. About 6 to 8 hrs after I came to my senses 😓 told myself it is never gonna work 😖
Out of curiosity, I started searching about static website generators a keyword I just learned and landed on Hugo. It was looking neat, all steps are almost similar to Jekyll. So once again I repeated all steps. Find a Hugo theme, this time I dint add content. The first thing I wanted to do was to make sure I can** generate a website and host it in NFSN.
Finally, I succeeded! I hosted a website using a minimal theme. I’ve made it. I’m got my space online … hurray!!!
It was difficult at first, but then I managed to understand Hugo’s templates and its theme structure. I had heavily modified a theme and hosted my website. My past two weeks have been busy modifying the theme, writing a couple of articles and seeing how it is rendering on PC and mobile. Asked a friend to read it, making sure it is all working as expected.
Tags
- rant