This post is about my first post on my new website.
Hi if you are reading this then I probably know you so you don't need much of an introduction to me. If you want to see what I think the world should know about me head on over to About Me. If you are looking to see what else I have for my first post stick around and I'll let you know.
This post is about my work setting up this website and the efforts I put into making it my own. To start as you might be able to tell this was not all hand coded by me. In fact most of the coding was not done by me at all. This was a free template from a site called HTML5 UP. They have some amazing templates over there that if you are looking to make a website that is static and still looks nice I would highly recommend it. However all the content on the site is my content so it still took a bunch of hours to put together and get published. To do a brief synopsis of the rest of the post it will follow along in this order: Introduction, Web Hosting, Template download, Personalization, Conclusion. If you are looking to make a website like this keep reading and hopefully I will explain everything about what I did so you can copy it.
This website is hosted entirely for free. Yep that's right everything you see I did not pay a dime for (except for the domain). This is important for me because I do not expect large amounts of traffic on the site and I am not looking to pay for something no one will ever look at. It took me a while to find some way to host a website without having to pay money. I looked around at a bunch of providers and could not really find anything that had a truly free tier that would allow me to host the site and put my own domain on it. That was until I found out about github.io (now named pages.github.com). The people over at github are amazing. They let you host up to a gigabyte of data with a soft bandwidth cap of about 1 terabyte of data. Thats crazy nice. I knew this would work out great for me because first off I expect no one to go to the site so no chance I will hit my bandwidth cap, and second I would be amazed if I was even close to 200 megabytes let along a gigabyte of data hosted. It was perfect. They even let you bring your own domain and just point the name servers at the set of ip addresses they provide. Now you do have to come in with your own domain unless you just want the domain to be your github username.github.io which is fine but I already bought a domain so I figured why not. I got my domain through google domains by the way, super cheap and easy to set up. I'll get into getting a domain in a different post. Now I got hosting out of the way time to get a website made!
Once I had a good place to host a website and a domain now came the hard part, coding. I personally do not hate coding in HTML, but I also am a student and did not have the time to code a website looking this nice in HTML and css. I knew I had to look for some sort of template of program that could make the HTML for me. Luckily I was browsing around on the internet and happened across this amazing website and great creator. It was called HTML5 UP. I saw some of the templates they had and fell in love. The first edition of the website was something a little more basic, acting more as a placeholder as I figured out what I wanted to do with the site. It looked nice and overall worked pretty well for what it did. Later on (about a year after initial release) I started watching more and more youtube about people who document their journey through Capture the flag events and learning about different aspects of the Information Security field. This has always interested me and I love learning from people who are willing to put themselves out there and present something that they have a grasp on. I started watching one particular youtuber who gave me inspiration to update my website. His name on youtube is Network Chuck. He made a great point in his video “you need a website RIGHT NOW!!” stating that making a website and documenting your trials and learning could affect just one person making it worth it. I took that idea to heart and started working on a new site for me to document my work. I looked on HTML5 UP for a template that I felt fit my personality and was able to be crafted into what I wanted to do. I chose this template called Solid State because it fit all those needs. I downloaded it and started crafting right away.
Okay I know i'm getting a little wordy and you probably do not care about what I am saying anymore. I’ll make this brief. After downloading and setting up the template I had to get working right away to make the site usable for my case and understandable to me. I started by changing index.html to hold all my information I wanted to be available right away and adding in place holders for everything else. I knew I wanted to blog but I did not want to get started on that until I had an idea for the rest of the site. I made my index and created a second page called About Me. This second page if you have not checked it out just holds some information about me to have an idea of who I am and why I even am worth reading. After those two pages were created and shaped based on what I wanted to show I set off to start making the blog setup. This involved creating more pages to hold the list of all blog postings and actual blog posts (just like this one). This was pretty easy overall because I had been working with the template and understood what I needed to do to make the pages look how I wanted them to. I used other samples from the template to make sure I had every detail looking how I imagined and was done. Just like that I had the outline of my website and beginning of my blog. Last thing for me to do was write this which actually came out pretty easy once I got going on it.
Alright I am finally at the conclusion. That was a lot to unpack very quickly. So to give a TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) I first found a free web hosting solution through Github got a domain through Google domains, found a template from HTML5 UP, personalized it, then wrote this post. Overall a fairly easy process and at the end of the day if this is my only ever blog post I am glad I did it because I learned some from this process and hope some other people can too. If you have any questions on anything I wrote or did or just any questions for me my email is [email protected]. I hope to make some more posts in the future about different projects I work on. I am currently writing a post on how to get a domain and how to set it up like I did for this site (it should be a shorter post that's a little more focused if that's w