I've always wanted my own website. Like, forever. Not Wordpress-like, but my
own, written from scratch. I figured out that this meant that I would have to
use a static site generator. This post is all about how I bought my first
domain, chose a hosting provider, set up DNS correctly, generated my website's
content, and set up auto-deploy upon git push.
The motivation to create this website came from a co-worker who I discovered had built his site using Skeleton. This seemed doable to me, not knowing the basics of getting a website up and running. I tried not to use Skeleton like he did, but since I had zero experience with web development (save the occasional tinkering with HTML in those Web 1.0 days when I had blogs on Blogger.com and Wordpress) I eventually figured out the basics of what I needed to know in order to get started - a path which eventually led me to use Skeleton.
The code for my website is here on Github.
Naming things is hard - it took me a while before I settled on this current
domain name. Google Domains has a pretty good deal for .dev domains (currently
$12 annually) and for an extra $6 a month, I got a custom email address on this
domain too via their Workspace Business Starter option.
I had to set up these DNS records: A, CNAME, and TXT (for Github Pages,
see below).
I asked Hacker News which static site generator to use, and based on the responses, I went with my gut feeling and decided to use Pelican. I liked the documentation and it seemed to use Python (which I wanted to use), so it was an easy decision for me.
I couldn't be happier with my choice. Pelican seems to have a bunch of different plugins which allow you to do things like adding a sitemap to your site, and adding a "Read More" link to your blog posts, and so on.
Building my own website from scratch using Pelican has been a very rewarding and fulfilling experience. I don't know a lot of HTML or CSS beyond the very basics, so I'm getting to learn a considerable amount of how they work together, and the various tags and options available.
Now, since I wanted a custom website theme, I found Pelican to be quite forbidding as a newbie since the documentation says that in order to create a new theme, you've got to have ALL these templates:
└── templates
├── archives.html // to display archives
├── period_archives.html // to display time-period archives
├── article.html // processed for each article
├── author.html // processed for each author
├── authors.html // must list all the authors
├── categories.html // must list all the categories
├── category.html // processed for each category
├── index.html // the index (list all the articles)
├── page.html // processed for each page
├── tag.html // processed for each tag
└── tags.html // must list all the tags. Can be a tag cloud.
templates contains all the templates that will be used to generate the content. The template files listed above are mandatory...
What they didn't say in that section was that one does not need to
specify every single one of those files, and that the files thus omitted will
simply be inherited from the simple theme. This they shoved into a separate
section on
Inheritance way
down in the page:
If one of the mandatory files in the
templates/directory of your theme is missing, it will be replaced by the matching template from the simple theme.
The theme is very bare bones and is adapted from the source code of the getskeleton.com website.
Choosing Github Pages for hosting was an easy choice was easy as this is offered for free. Plus, I was excited about setting up a CI/CD pipeline for generating my website through Github Actions and Workflows. I looked at existing examples and got that up and running too! Check it out: deploy.yml