Welcome to my site

Welcome to my personal website! I recently decided to start experimenting with self-hosting and build my first home server. I built this website to share my findings and experiences with setting up my first home server, and I’ll continue to post about the projects I’m working on.

Choosing the platform

Choosing the platform to make this website hasn’t gone so smoothly. So here is a short recap.

Vanilla

Because I love to code, and I’m not afraid of doing some front-end designing work, I started completely from scratch and built my website with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And while it was fun to do, I quickly realized that it was way too much work. I kept changing the CSS code because there was always this one little thing that wasn’t exactly right. Because I wanted this site to be a blog first, and I did not want to fiddle with everything else all the time, I decided that this was not the way to go.

WordPress

Do I have to explain this choice? WordPress is a very well-known blogging platform, so I thought, why not give it a go? I found a Turnkey WordPress Linux container in Proxmox which made installing WordPress really easy. I spun up the container and started experimenting with the WordPress dashboard. After spending a whole evening on hunt for a good theme I settled on one that was the closest to what I wanted. I tried changing the looks of it a little like changing the colours, but I soon discovered that a lot of options where behind a pay-wall. I tried to make the best of it, but the frustrations piled up and I wasn’t happy with the end result.

Jekyll themes

That’s when I discovered the really beautiful Jekyll theme Chirpy that was nearly exactly what I was looking for. I stumbled upon it when watching a YouTube video from Techno Tim and opening his documentation site. I decided that this was the way to go. Because I was already taking notes in Markdown and working with git and GitHub, so it was really easy to get started.

So that’s where I am now and I’m really happy with how everything is looking.

Development environment

I made a GitHub repository for this website from the Chirpy starter template and cloned it to my local machine. I followed the getting started guide from Chirpy but I had some trouble getting the right version of Ruby installed on my system, so I went with the Docker container solution. I wished I had tried that sooner because since I had Docker already installed it was just a matter of spinning up the container and I had a working site to test with.

First blog post

Techno Tim has a video about this Jekyll theme so I watched it in case I overlooked something, but everything was really straight-forward. I changed the _config.yml file and personalized my site. Then I only had to write an about me section, write this very first blog post and my personal site was born.

Have fun exploring and reading my next posts!