Today marks the deployment of my blog! It came far quicker than I'd previously expected, and on quite a different platform. What kept me off it initially, on top of the cost, was the fact that I didn't particularly wanting my thoughts to be read by people I didn't know on a personal basis. But, well, keeping this website fairly well-hidden will help with that side of things I suppose. I don't plan to monetise it, nor do I plan on doing any sort of SEO. Think of it as my diary having somehow found its way onto Wikipedia with no tags, no categories, no links towards it: it's there for everyone to see if they know where it is, but no one else is going to see it.
Of course, that's just the plan as things stand. I didn't think I'd get the website started so quickly, but it did, so who knows how things'll work out. In any case, getting this set up has been incredibly fun, and I'd just like to outline the process of how that all came to be, but first: why did I bite the bullet?
Like most decisions I make, it wasn't particularly thought-out or premeditated. In fact, I wasn't even really thinking about the blog at the time - I was browsing through PrivacyTools when their section on hosting options reignited the idea of managing my own site. Again, being able to host my own web-apps, keep some kind of a portfolio and a journal on my own, personally managed platform, accessible and updatable from anywhere? An absolute dream.
I was perusing through more hosting options, looking at the various Content Management Systems (CMSs) offered - WordPress, of course, was by far the most common sight, when a reddit thread came up recommending that, well, why not just use Github Pages? This is the proverbial turning point of my day. If you look at the about page, though, you'll notice this isn't hosted on Github Pages - I let Netlify handle that aspect of things (my decision was hugely influenced by this blog post). But that's beside the point for now: what put me off WordPress?
To keep things short, there's 2 main reasons at play here:
- Past the operational side of things (I don't care about generating my own SSL certificate), I want to have complete control over how my website looks and how it's laid out, to the point of not wanting it externally hosted. This means being able to store everything on a github repo as static pages was exactly what I was looking for. In this case, I've let Simply Jekyll theme do most of the work. I like where the creator's head is at in terms of functionality and look, and it comes with a couple neat features.
- Overhead. WordPress' learning curve isn't particularly steep for someone who has any sort of background in web development (this isn't to say I'm included in that bracket of people), but I didn't want, let alone need to have the level of support WordPress boasts due to its popularity. This isn't even mentioning that hosting a static website is free! It was a no-brainer to me. Snapping up the faridz.com domain was inevitable anyway, and paying £10 a year made the pros heavily outweigh the cons.
At this point, my mind was set. A static webpage, built on Jekyll, hosted on Netlify, deployed from a Github repo, with a domain purchased from Google Domains (I didn't want Google to have any more of my info than they already do, but they seemed a much more upfront with their prices than alternative domain registrars). This does mean, though, that the site can only be 100GB large, due to Github's repo size limitations. A crying shame, if you ask me.
I'm currently working on prettying up the site a little - making it a little bit more me, I guess, as well as making a section of it private. The latter part's a bit harder, especially since the website is just static pages, but I'm sure there's gonna be a workaround somehow. The website's taken up my entire day though, meaning my Korean study was kind of shoved aside, but I did my requisite vocab so hopefully this doesn't become much of a hindrance. In any case, I'm very happy with how it's worked out, public or not.