Background
I’ve had a domain for nearly a decade now. After college, I created a website, williamhord.com, to host my resume and a few small projects. I hosted it on NearlyFreeSpeech.net for a meager cost at the recommendation of a coworker from my Computer Repair job. It was only a static site that I wrote out in a text editor with bare HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I kept it up for a few years, added this domain, and added a few more projects after, but honestly, it being written by hand was a hindrance in many regards, and I didn’t do much writing then, so a blog wasn’t a priority. It felt bare; I rarely updated or even visited it. Eventually, I let the funding run out on the account, and the server was taken down. Around the time of acquiring the williamis.online domain I started using a Google Workspace account for Email and Google Drive storage.
Why a site now?
I want to use william@williamis.online as my primary email more often but have been hesitant to do so when I didn’t have a site up at the domain. Additionally, over the past year and a half or so I’ve started journaling more consistently and have found a bit of a voice in writing. I’d like, if for no one except myself, to start a blog and post longer form write-ups of projects I’m working on in my spare time, bike trips I go on, and maybe some events I attend.
Other than that I wanted to explore a few more technologies that I didn’t necessarily have a reason to explore beforehand. I can much more easily sink my teeth into unfamiliar tech when I have a project associated with it. Specifically, I am planning to get an AWS certification, and they have free credits for a few months and reasonable costs after that, so why not host it there?
How I made it
I had initially planned to host this site on an AWS EC2 instance with Debian. I set up the EC2, logged in remotely, updated the OS, and began to install WordPress. Annoyingly, I ran into some configuration issues when I wanted to use MariaDB instead of MySQL. I spent a day or so trying to get WordPress up and running only for some errors to come up that I didn’t feel I had the energy or time to diagnose. I felt a little stuck but then I realized I fell back into the trap I can often fall into of trying to expose myself to too many new things at once. I was trapped in the “how” instead of the end goal. I’ve been paying more attention to that habit recently and decided to look at other options available.
Amazon Lightsail seemed perfect for this after reviewing their comparison chart. Additionally, it came with a pre-configured image that included WordPress already installed and, once the free trail is over, has a very reasonable static cost each month instead of the dynamic price of EC2. It felt like a win in nearly every direction.
After doing the initial configuration on the Lightsail instance, configuring HTTPS via LetsEncrypt, updating my DNS records with Google Domains, and logging in I got to work building the site in WordPress. I selected a theme I liked, made some changes to it and to the site structure, and here I am just one day later! I still want to make some tweaks to make the UI feel more like my own, but all in all, I’m off to the races. I have a functional site and I’m finishing up my first post. Thanks for following along and stay tuned for more!
– William