Starting my personal site

Why am I’m creating a personal site?

Well, the idea is to have the most important things about me in a single place under my control.

If you want to take control over your online presence, I really recommend that you give it a try. A personal site it’s not as hard as it sounds. I had the realization yesterday that I needed it, and just made it happen by today.

You only need a few things:

An identity or brand

Figure out something that represents you or something you can stand for. Then give it a name. For instance, I like simplicity, I often think people make stuff overcomplicated for no good reason, sometimes even to intentionally fool you. So, I’m pretty sure I can stand for simplicity and straightforwardness. That’s why I picked “Way Too Simple”, which also tries to be a bit humorous.

But of course, creating an identity requires self-knowledge. However, don’t overthink it, you can change it later!

For starters, it could be simply your name, I just felt that mine was boring.

A domain

I bought waytoosimple.me for like 7 bucks on a first-year discount. After that, is like $14 per year. You do need to configure your DNS records, something that I’ve done before, but if you haven’t, your domain vendor should help you to do it.

A CMS or site builder technology

You need something to build your site with. For this one, I picked Hugo. I’ve created many WordPress sites before, and think WP is a great option, but with static site creators like Hugo you don’t need to keep track of database backups, PHP configurations, etc. For a simple site, it’s just good enough, and you just need to keep backups of a few files, and Hugo will rebuild your whole site out of them.

Some web hosting

Yeah, it would probably cost you something, but might be as little as $2 or $3 per month. And if you used a static site generator, your web hosting could be of the simplest kind. Alternatively, I have a VPS where I run other stuff, including a Mastodon server called Cubatech. So, I just configured nginx to serve the Hugo-generated files from a folder, in addition to the Mastodon server.

HTTPS certificate

I also configured nginx to use an HTTPS certificate provided by my domain vendor. But if you went with the static site, it would probably work without HTTPS. However, it’s recommended that you set up HTTPS properly so that people can feel safer in your site, even if it’s just a static site. It will also help with your SEO. I won’t cover how to set up the certificate, but you’d probably find some guides online.

In conclusion

I know it’s some work, specially if you’re not technically oriented, but in the end, it will payoff IMO. You’ll get a single place under your control to share everything you care about. Hey, and if it’s hard, then the satisfaction will be just greater :-)