💾 Archived View for tommi.space › 2020-04-18-Making-this-website.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:41:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Building a website from scratch can be challenging. It took me several months of study, practice, tests and neverending headaches to get to this result. The process can be overwhelming (to me it definitely has been): there are tons of different tools, resouces and tutorials; nevertheless, it’s always so hard to spend the right amount of time learning something by evaluating its overall usefulness. Since the beginning, I chose to do everything by myself: I decided not to use any framework, CMS or copy and paste any code I couldn’t understand.
I wanted to learn by doing and do it in the best possible way.
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Yep, quite an ambitious purpose. Thus, in the end I decided to take advantage of a Static Site Generator, which doesn’t necessarily make things heavier but for sure it makes them simpler and way quicker. We’ll get there.
One last thing before diving in: this article is not intended to be a guide or a tutorial. Since I’ve been struggling a lot to get here, I feel like it may be useful to someone to know the path I followed (or, better, traced) to obtain what I was aiming at. Not having any clue of the right next step is so stressful, I’ve been on the edge of giving up multiple times.
Eventually, another point it’s worth making is that web develpement is ridicolously cheap: you just need a laptop (not even a powerful one), everything else is for free (actually, I bought this book, but online there are a few great alternatives). The only, huge price you need to pay is time. I spent handful of restless hours fighting with the urgency and the desire of getting things done, and trying to have paticence of going on by gradual steps.
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I had absolutely no idea where to start. My only notions of programming were some basic concepts of C, which I studied at University. I knew nothing about server management, HTML, CSS, JavaScript or web hosting. My previous website was created on Wix with a drag-and-drop GUI to build anything.
So, the first question I asked myself was:
where should I start?
As of when I’m writing, xplosionmind.tk isn’t completed. The following steps are part of a bullet-list which I enhanced and completed before publishing.
Since I spent my whole COVID-19 quarantine (two months ish) doing this, I'm gonna add the git commit date of each step at the beginning.
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As I wrote before, since I was so lost and I had no idea of the best starting point, I bought a book on basic web programming: “HTML and CSS” by Jon Duckett. I spent ten days reading and studying it thoroughly. After that, I knew all the basics, then I was able to start building a test page.
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I chose the about page to be my test page. At first, it wasn't a section of the homepage, but a standalone one. I struggled to make it look like the one on the Wix website (I won’t link it anymore, you can browse around using the first one I gave) and I couldn’t make it appear nicely, until I discovered the object-fit CSS property, which changed my game.
To be honest, even after finishing the book I knew nothing about frameworks but after reading this article I told myself I wouldn't need one. Even after completing the website, I still don't know if I made the right choice. Without a doubt, my style.css file is a huge mess. Nevertheless, I get things done pretty easily by searching classes' names in the file and I have only a stylesheet, so it’s good.
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I decided to use the include php function to have only a header and a footer file.
http://webtypography.net/intro/