How should I make my personal website?
I am not a developer, but I do have interesting in learning.
A while ago I asked a question similar to that. I did not take any concrete action since then, and now have some new information to add.
The website shall be called myactualname.com, and will contain about/biography, and a few sections containing articles that I wish to write on different subjects.
That can probably be done without coding on one of the many free blogging platforms currently available, such as Medium, Wordpress, and Substack, but the lack of control is unfortunate.
At the same time, I wish for this website to last a long time, and to be reasonably independent of maintenance. With the Brazilian Real valued at less than one-fifth of the US dollar, hosting prices skyrocketed. Besides, I cannot always rely on my own ability to stay on top of that kind of thing, so it would be beneficial for my web presence to be more resilient than my bank account and mental state. I figure that hosting it on Github Pages, Gitlab Pages (or both) would be a good way to avoid ever going down (it looks like duplicate content is bad for search engines, though, so I might keep one of those private, just for backup reasons). And I could reserve the domain for two or three years in advance.
I really like simple text-focused personal websites like this one. They load fast and are easy to read, but are generally not very pretty or responsive. I have basic notions of HTML and CSS and intend to learn more.
In the previous post, someone suggested using Hugo, which seems like a good option. On the other hand, for something that simple, I wonder what would be the downside of simply coding it from scratch. One thing I know for sure is that I want this website to be rather permanent: whatever changes I ever do to its design should not impact accessibility to previous content (link rot). How can I achieve that? No idea.
Since I write in English and Portuguese, the website must be bilingual. I'm not sure how to implement or manage that, especially in regards to search engines.
I resumed the course on Free Code Camp, which I expect will help in achieving all that.
With that in mind, I reiterate my question: should I make my personal website? Should I just use a free blogging platform? Should I use Hugo or something similar? Any particular free CMS? Or maybe just use what I learn to code it from scratch?
Thanks!
The key term you're going to want to search for is
static site generatorfor further research.Hugo is a good choice, but it's got some weird quirks that put me off.
One of the few bloggers I read uses Pelican for their blog, and it apparently works pretty well.
I've heard good things about Zola. I've used it for a few articles on a small web page, so I can't say how well it will scale, but it seems decent enough. It even has multilingual support although I haven't used it.
Github Pages uses Jekyll by default, but you can set it up so that Github Actions automatically generates your site using whichever SSG you want, so it's not a big deal.
No matter what you choose, (most?) static site generators tend to have a way to style the site and articles with custom HTML/CSS templates, so one thing you may want to look into is the templating syntax each one uses to render it, and see which fits you best. They also have methods to manage automatic linking and avoiding link rot, so you shouldn't worry too much about that.
Cool.
I wonder if I should revisit the basic HTML/CSS/JS course before proceeding, or if I should just jump to the tutorials. I'm afraid that doing so might lead to some bad decisions, creating problems later on.
It might not offer you as much control as you’d like, but write.as is a very nice and dead simple blogging platform.
I really like
write.as, but I wish to have something that resembles more of a personal website, with sections and stuff. Thanks.I've been pretty happy with Hugo on my personal site, but I've never really been fond of web design, so I just wanted something where I could just do minimal tweaks to the theme, and Hugo's been good for that.
I'm not fluent in another language (silly American education), but I do know that Hugo, and many Hugo themes have support for translation and multilingual sites/posts. Here's some cool stuff I found: https://gohugo.io/content-management/multilingual/ https://www.regisphilibert.com/blog/2018/08/hugo-multilingual-part-1-managing-content-translation/
The main reason I like the markdown static site generators, rather than just trying to code from scratch is because I like to divorce the writing from the making of a website. If I try and write a page in HTML, I just get bogged down with the formatting, plus dealing with the header and footer is just a distraction. Whereas, if I write in markdown, it's easier for me to stay focused on the writing. It's also handy, since a lot of the writing I do starts as markdown notes that I take on CTF challenges or other things like that. So often, I can copy-paste my notes into a Hugo page and have a really great foundation.
Not being a developer myself, I've been also there. In my view, you should try something called Eleventy. It's simple and fun. I tried jekyll in the past and later I tried to use Gatsby, but it was a nightmare to me.
I second Eleventy - I haven't used it yet myself, but it's the generator I plan to use on my personal site, in part due to their focus on accessibility.
For that, you would want this page: https://gohugo.io/content-management/multilingual/
Hugo's documentation is very good. I've used Hugo for a few small sites and have always found that the problems I encounter are common enough for answers to be in the documentation.
I don't know if I agree. I tried my hand at it today. I did manage to get a prototype online, but there are lots missing from the docs. I am not a developer and from my point of view, the documentation is sparse. I get the impression that Hugo is not really targeted towards people like me. So I end up following random tutorials, whose quality I can't really judge.
If I choose an already made Hugo theme, does the theme need continuous support? I mean, will I depend on the developer to update it to remain compatible with future versions of Hugo? Or is it a set and forget kind of thing? I purchased a WordPress theme once and when my support period ended, I couldn't update to make it compliant with a new version of WordPress. I'd like to avoid that.
If you're a student, sign up for GitHub's Student Developer pack.
This will warrant you great benefits: $100 in credit for DigitalOcean droplets which you can use to host your entire site including any content on it up to 1TB in bandwidth a month for $5; You can obtain more free domains with your name from various registrars.
I would use a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo. No need for creating and formatting individual HTML pages for any and all webpages on your site. Previously did this before using static site generators which I thought weren't needed and would do the exact thing, I was wrong. Instead, it will import all of your formatting including your headers and footers displayed with the content you're writing in markdown and exports this to your web server directory. This helps prevent link rotting as you've mentioned as any changes will reproduce across all your pages too.
If low maintenance is the biggest priority, I would go with a GitHub page and implement the same Jekyll setup through a repository. The only downfall to doing this, you are restricted in other use for your website, such as a reverse proxy through nginx or image hosting. Additionally, if more extensive configuration is needed for your webpage like HTTP headers to implement a Content Security Policy, I do not believe GitHub pages offers that flexibility.
My use case is a bit different, but I’d appreciate the feedback. My wife recently started producing artwork again and she needs a site that has a gallery and a shopping cart.
Customers should be able to see what products are available and purchase them.
Thanks for any ideas.
Shopify or everyone’s favorite podcast sponsor Squarespace would be good fits. Shopify is a more powerful e-commerce platform while squarespace is better at letting layman consumers produce good looking websites
Those are both platform services, though, so you’ll have to pay them and/or they’ll take revenue cuts.
Unfortunately e-commerce is a lot more complicated than a personal webpage so just static isn’t going to cut it, and doing it yourself would require substantial dev work, not to mention admin know how.
Thank you!!
Shopify, and consider opening an Etsy shop as well.
Stripe will also let you create payment links nowadays, i absolutely recommend opening an account with them as you'll probably need to regardless for Shopify.
Thank you!!
I do, thanks!
Another question: is there a cheap/free to permanently host images that I use on my website?
Most of the really big providers have storage services in the vein of Amazon’s S3 service, which lets you pay just for the storage and bandwidth. That tends to be a pretty decent way to serve any kind of static media.
If you end up using GitHub Pages, just stick them in an
imgfolder near your HTML and Markdown files.Free and forever.
Cool. I wonder if I'll ever run out of space though. I plan to post some film analysis with large screenshots.
I see. How permanent/resilient should I expect a free service like that to be? I'm now looking into a way to have some kind of backup, so the image won't fail to load. Maybe use a
nonerrorevent? There's nothing worse than a website that fades away...Git Large File Storage is an option, although I wouldn't set it up until you really need it.
I'm also from Brazil and i host my website on github. Here it is: https://crdpa.net
I just write my pages with markdown and convert using a custom bash script i wrote and just push to the repo.
The only cost is Google Domains.