Website Development Log #1

8-20-2022

   So just to go back in time a bit i want to go all the way back to where this all started for me... and because I wrote years after this all happened.

  It started in college just me sitting between classes in science building with my bud procrastinating. Not doing my thermos or dynamics homework because frankly I’m lost. I just follow the shape of math on paper and seem to get me the A I wanted but I’m not really understanding it. So instead of studying I decided to distract myself and dream about being Computer science major. I had installed Linux on my old family computer to get a Minecraft server running for me and friends during the pandemic. The entire experience left me with more than just fun time with my friend; it gave me a million questions about every step that the guide just breezed over. And I even opened completely unsecure port to world wide web (later realizing that it would break every 2 weeks as my Ip address rolled onto a new one).

  I had also had interest in computers and read up on every topic that I question about during my teen years but never really applied the knowledge I attempting to acquire. Now with unemployed college student schedule and hardest part behind me I then decided on was going to try to earn myself a “self-taught Computer science minor”. Aka just gets basic project and do it no matter how long or pointless it seemed so I could possess a little more practice and knowledge than I could just finishing college in mechanical engineering. I was bored anyway and already owned a computer so may as well learn while I sitting there doing nothing.

   And the starting idea was simple, get something up on the web in a barebones way. Get framework or method that will allow growth and we can come back to years later without issues. Also, while doing this I asked why to help understand every stage of the process. So where do we end up? We get static site with no account I must sign into to update or modify it, and you piggyback off GitHub. So, no Squarespace or WordPress or random other bad free tier website. Just html and CSS like it 1999. Also, I can’t figure out Jekyll to save my life. And don’t even get me started on all the others html generators that somehow support all 30,000 frameworks and web stacks I can’t even learn about fast enough. Seriously it overwhelms me in beginning watching 4-5 hours of guides on them with nothing to show for it and in that time a new web stack was developed. Default guides also make themes that are almost as bad as this site but at least I get to be proud of it.

  So here we are with a completely handwritten raw HTML and CSS site. It also has icons and logos badly made by me even for tab (I’m proud of that little one). I just brute forced it and made templates I copy and paste to make a new post and hand add in link for every single page. Is this a bad way to do it? Yes. Why? Cause if I ever want to update it, I must take every single page and fix it manually. Do this to 10 pages not so bad. How about 100? A very long time and mistake prone. So, it is good thing I’m a procrastinator and never post on this site because right now it looks like that will be problem for future me in year 2030 when I’m spending too much time updating this site. But some older generation web devs may agree the doing HTML and CSS manually is best way for this size of a site and I tend to agree. Besides, the goal of this project was to learn web dev work basics, not learn tool that will be obsolete in few years. Plus, I can now understand html and CSS I need feed into generator later down the line when I grow to that point. I would hope one day someone will just make a simple desktop program that just takes a custom theme and makes a folder with generated html and CSS that I upload to a server or GitHub.

So here is overview my website and how it works:

CSS file:

-Single CSS file where 70% of its classes cover theme off all the pages

-20% of this CSS file is page specific classes

-10% just for different sizes of photos I can put into posts

HTML file:

-Header fix shared between them all(normal)

-Top bar shared between all pages

-Footers shared between them all

-Custom html for “about”, “home page”, “post” pages

-Post template

  So that how we ended up here at least so far cause its most likely not over until much later when I make this a proper site. Maybe even self-host for home lab project when I figure how to do that safely. So look out part 2 in 4-5 years