Creating my blog

Hey Everyone, welcome to my blog

Still suck at writing but like any other skill it gets better with time, so fingers crossed. I told my self that I must have a something of my own, on the internet before the year ends, what better to start with than my own personal blog.

Picking a domain name

When I wanted to buy a domain name, I went to Reddit for some insight and it came down to three choices. NameCheap, Porkbun and Cloudfare.
I didn’t go with cloudfare because some people complained how hard it was to move away from them or something along that line, so i crossed it out of my list. Now I was down to two choices Porkbun and NameCheap. I decided to go with porkbun even if the name sounds weird because they are slightly cheaper than namecheap. Good thing you can always switch domain providers if and when needed.

Picking a Static Site Generator

At first I wanted to go with Hugo, heard a lot of good things about it, it’s performance mostly. If you have ever coded in windows you understand how daunting and annoying it can be. Windows is good for so many things, but coding isn’t one. I had to switch laptops for some reasons and didn’t want to install linux on some one else’s laptop so using linux on the system was out of it.I thought of alternatives to this, first was to use my aws free tier to setup an instance, ssmed(not sure that’s correct, but you get the point) into it to use it as my development machine, It was working fine a bit, till i ran into some issues and the aws community made sure to let me know how crazy the idea was. So I opted for codespaces, that was too slow it was basically unusable. Since I didn’t want to download a lot of development tools, I had to let Hugo go and I switched to Astro. It was pretty straight forward since Astro runs on Nodejs, I just download that, got a template cause i suck at designing and got it running.

Hosting

Another choice paralysis I faced was choosing where to host, since is it a static site I thought of Netlify, Github pages, Cloudfare pages and s3 with Cloudfront. I do not trust aws with their billing system so that was out. I have hosted with Netlify and Github pages in the past so I wanted to try something different that’s why I choose Cloudfare pages. This is subject to change if need be, as I add more things to my blog. But for the time being, it serving.

Issues faced

The template i used, used Tinacms, I just went with it for my cms, configuring its environment variables with Astro posed an issue, the method to call the variables provided on the documentation, wasn’t working so after much research i found an answer.

Also build for the Tinacms kept failing in production, after searching their discord and rereading carefully I realised I wasn’t using the latest version of the package and had to update that.

Typical npm always giving headaches with their dependency tree.

So yeah that’s all the process that went into building the blog, nothing to fancy, but I am celebrating a little win and also looking forward to getting better at writing.