Back in the olden days of high school, I took a class focusing on website coding and designing.
Very simple stuff, but I really had fun with it.
I had spent many of my waking hours on other people's websites, and now I knew the basics myself!
Since then, I had always had an idea in the back of my mind about making my own website, hosting it on a cloud, and letting others visit.
After waiting long enough, I took it upon myself to use some of my freetime to begin creating it.
My plan from the beginning was to try to create as much of the website by myself as I could.
I didn't want to use any shortcut website makers, drag-and-drop programs, or AI to make my webpages.
Afterall, writing the HTML and CSS is the fun part for me! Why should I skip that?
How could I look anyone in the eye and tell them I made my own website if I took a detour and didn't do the work myself?
To the layperson, a cookie-cutter, copy-and-paste website might look way better and be easier to make in the end.
But I would know in my heart of hearts that I had failed myself by doing it the easy way.
So I loaded up the old reliable Notepad++ and got to work building this place from scratch.
I recognize that Notepad++ is more of a text editor that can be used for writing code, as opposed to a full featured IDE like VSCode that covers other areas of development.
But I find that keeping things simple in the beginning is the best for small projects.
I anticipate whenever I redo/remake/remaster this website over the years, I may add different functionality and features.
And as such, a different coding environment will be necessary.
However, for the time being Notepad++ is an excellent tool for this job and it's a joy to use.
After many iterations, changes, and proof-reading cycles, my bare HTML and CSS was complete!
It looked great on my machine, but that's a problem if only I can see it.
I want the world see it and to do that I needed to get these webpages hosted.
Choosing a cloud service provider was a tad difficult as there are an overwhelming amount of choices and ways to do it.
In education and professional settings, I've used Azure.
But in my previous freetime, I've used AWS.
Oh wait, cause now I'm learning about Cloudflare Pages and that might be a better fit for this project.
Can't forget about Google Cloud, Github Pages, Render, DigitalOcean, IONOS. Good grief, which one is the better choice?
In the end, I ultimately decided with Cloudflare pages as it seemed like the best deal.
There may have been a better choice for hosting my website,
but spending any more time comparing all the possible alternatives was preventing me from actually making any progress.
Better to pick one of my top choices, jump in with both feet, make mistakes, and learn.
Perhaps in future projects I may choose a different host for different benefits.
Afterall, I'd only be holding myself back if I stuck with one until the end of time!
However, I did not purchase my domain through Cloudflare.
For that I used Porkbun. I decided to keep my domain registrar and hosting seperate so that I could switch hosts in the future without worrying about locked into one vendor.
Plus, there is the sentiment of using a registrar that's really good at domain name management and using a seperate providor that's really good at hosting.
Better not to put all my eggs in one basket!