📱 Use your domain

I start this new year having impulse purchased a domain. I did it because it was affordable, and it sounds great. SeeCoral is a great pun. The transaction and approval went through and I realised I need to host something on that domain now- lest it remain empty forever. I would need to go dig out a simple static site generator, learn how to use it, decide what I want to say and do with this new found platform I’ve made myself.

This is what my brain looked like this:

😬 😓 🥳 😬

At least there was some celebration! Let’s use that.

🧗‍♀️ Don’t panic

Over a week after that crisis I remembered all this pressure is imaginary. I decided to share my journey to getting this post out. What post #2 is is future me’s problem. For now, I’m tackling the basic problems one step at a time, and documenting the journey.

What’s the easiest content to host?

A blog. There are heaps of static site generators dedicated to helping you make accessible blog content, and I’ve been telling myself to get over me fear of writing things on the internet.

Which tools do I use?

Good question. I’m a developer, so a gravitate towards a DIY approach. I usually use JS and Python - which both have plenty of good options for static site hosting. However, I don’t want this to feel like work. So I want something new; something that will be a virtual barrier between the work and play.

I’m using Ruby, and Jeykyll. Why? Well, a few reasons. The primary reason was that a previous website I built used GitHub’s inbuilt Jekyll templating and hosting, so I decided to do the same. I’m lazy and nervous about the whole endeavour so I wanted to ease the habit in gently.

My secondary reasons are more fun, I wanted;

  • to learn the Ruby ecosystem, and
  • to learn how to build beautiful websites.

This is a safe space to play. I’ve never used ruby and many people I enjoy working with like it. I’m also not great at making beautiful websites, so I can slowly learn to build up my own style and swap out default templates for something more personalised.

So there we have it. Some reasoning, and a direction.

Let’s build!

To get set up I abandoned my native windows ecosystem in favour of Linux, because good package management is enough of a reason to pick an OS. Being able to install my development environment from the terminal without having to jump through hoops to install binaries etc cannot be understated. I wish choco would get to the same point. I might just be writing text right now, but I’m still doing it in VSCode with live content reloading to check the visual flow of content, and doing this in windows still causes erroneous firewall triggers. I have every intention of doing more fun things… somewhere in the distance future.

So, I have a default version of ruby but it’s very out of date. A cursory google search gives me rbenv. I love the modern world of package managers. I started my career when DLL Hell was still a thing. Anyway, it was as simple as

sudo apt install rbenv
rbenv init
rbenv install A.B.C
rbenv global A.B.C
gem install jekyll bundler
jekyll new this_website

and there we have it. Not only a developer environment, but a blog ready to be filled with my ramblings.

Not much actual development was needed after this. I finished up by

  • writing up this post,
  • cleaned out irrelevant autogenerated content, and
  • added something to the about me and index pages.

It wasn’t quite enough, so I decided to learn about SVG. My creation likes on the home for this site & I’ll try write a glow about it when I’ve figured out how to animate it. There we go - by the end of post 1 I know what post 2 will be - SVGs for absolute newbies!