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2022-06-06 - Web Development - Administration

Hopefully you can see this because that means that I didn't mess anything up when updating the site! I'll quickly recap what I did over the last week and clarify what's in the pipeline for this upcoming week.

So I ended up destroying and remaking the Vultr VPS [Virtual Private Server if I didn't clarify that previously] so that I could have a fresh, clean environment to start messing around in. I decided to go with their smallest, and cheapest plan to start things off [I think it can handle the traffic that I expect to start "pouring" in].

Vultr Pricing
Vultr Cloud Pricing

I found this video that explained how to calculate how much needed bandwidth I needed to budget for. Again I don't think I need much [something tells me I'm the only one checking in on this website 100 times a day]. I stuck with a Debian distribution for no reason in particular other than it's what I used previously on other VPSs [if your unfamiliar with Linux and Linux distributions I'll make some intro to Linux guides in the future that'll explain all the common nerd jargon].

I grabbed the domain name from dynadot and changed the DNS records to have it point to the IP of the VPS. I'll write up a full guide for this in a bit [honestly it's pretty easy]. I then installed nGinx, changed the config files to point to the html/css files, and started the service [kinda skipped the nitty gritty but again, guide incoming].

I was able to visit the site at this point from a client device but still had to set up SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] so that the connection was encrypted. Apparently it was pretty uncommon in the past to have encrypted connections on personal websites but that was changed with the help of the EFF with let's encrypt which offers free, open certificates [pretty cool of them honestly]. To make things even easier they also provide a python script(?) called certbot which automates the process of obtaining one of these ssl certificates. After I ran it I got the cool green lock icon in the address bar and was feeling pretty cool myself! :)

Those were the major updates for this week. Next week I'll be looking into hosting a git server to upload my code [including anything that I create for this website ie. html/css/scripting stuff] and a git visualiser. Hosting a git server seems easy enough but finding the right visualiser might need a bit more research. Right now the most promising candidate is stagit which is a static git page generator. Hope that works out.

The stretch goal for this week is the possibility to host videos with [maybe?] a peertube instance. Not sure how much of a pain and/or the bandwidth limitations will throttle the experience too much but it sounds useful to post, even short, videos demonstrating processes explicitly [if a picture is 1000 words than what does that make a video].

That's the update for the week.

Next TODOS! [Can be updated throughout the week]

Bottom of the Stack

2022-06-02 - Web Development - html/css

I'll start things off with the design goals of this very website and what I have done so far to get things going.

Unless things have changed drastically by the time you read this [which I doubt it has], it should be a fairly vanilla 1995 World Wide Web experience. There are a couple reasons I chose to go this route.

Aside from the glaring hurdle that is my complete lack of any formal or informal web development experience, I like keeping the UNIX philosophy in mind when working on my projects [although manipulated to mean exactly what I want it to mean at any given time]. For those unfamiliar, the basic principle is to design programs to do one thing and one thing well. I want this website to be a place where I throw my ideas into the void and can reference them later [and maybe share some of that knowledge to the few that find themselves here]. Although fun, interactive, dynamic features would be cool to look at, I think it, ultimately, restricts my ability to complete this goal effectively.

That isn't to say that I am completely against adding any scripting for the sake of learning or experimenting [this IS a hobby website after all], but I do want to be able to quickly document my progress without too much thought on aesthetic [aside from some font colors].

But let me get down to brass tacks, what have I done so far.

Well if I am being completely honest, we aren't even online yet. I bought a domain name from dynadot and have a Vultr VPS [hosting some other things at the moment], but haven't set anything else up. I'll look up some guides tomorrow [famous last words] to see how to get us up and running.

So that's what I haven't done. What I have done is started getting comfortable with HTML/CSS. I have written in other markup languages like Markdown and LaTeX so it wasn't too painful to pick up but getting used to syntax is something you can't really rush [maybe you can but I can't].

So, a few of the things I've learned so far:

  1. Basic HTML structure ie. Defining a page with "<!DOCTYPE html>" as well as <head>, <body>, and <html> tags.
  2. Other Basic HTML tags ie. <p>, <strong>, <em>, etc.
  3. How to link to a style sheet [a cascading one to be exact] with
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$(LOCATION OF THE STYLE SHEET)" />
  4. Defining specific tags with id, ie. id="name_of_tag"
  5. Basic CSS syntax
  6. Referencing specific tags by id with #$(ID_NAME)

Next TODOS! [Can be updated throughout the week]