First Post!

My first blog post!! #

As of today I have been learning to code with Launch school for almost three months, and I hope for this blog to serve as a fairly casual record, mostly for personal use, of my journey!

I figure that a decent use of this first post might be documenting the creation of this blog itself, and some of the steps I took.

The decision to create my own blog #

Although Launch School recommends using Medium for ease of use, I thought that this might be a good opportunity to explore what other options might be! When I took cs50, I ended up hosting my final project (in an admittedly simplistic way) from my home server, but after recently hearing about Static Site Generators in the podcast A Question of Code, I thought I might as well give that a look.

After a bit of duck-duck-go-ing, it seems that much of the internet in 2021 was recommending Hugo as a static site generator, and hosting the site itself using Netlify. I followed the Hugo quick start guide to create the file system for the website on my computer, created and pushed that to a private git repository, and am now hosting this post on my own blog! Pretty cool.

The next hurdle is sorting out how to use my own custom domain name for the blog. I don’t intend to spend too much time on this, but it seems worth tinkering with at least a little as well. I bought a few domain names on google domains that use my full name, and have configured the settings on Netlify hopefully close to correctly so that those domain names point to my blog. I’ll have to wait 24 hours or so to see if that actually works like I think and hope it should. DNS is quite confusing and I’m not sure I completely understand the instructions I’ve set within Netlify and Google Domains, so I’m typing this up now while I wait to see if it works! Fingers crossed.

Regardless, I’m excited to get this blog off the ground! My goal is to post something here once a week… documenting either some sort of summary of my progress that week, or potentially taking note of more detailed instructions that I find myself googling often in the hopes that it my help my future self, or maybe even others someday.

Here goes!

* Update *

DNS Works!