Setting up this website

I had some ideas for how I wanted to set up this website. This is my journal documenting what I did, what worked, what didn’t, what I learned, and how my vision changed to reflect that learning.

I want:

A blog, where I can write whatever I want.
A journal of the current thing I’m working on - you’re reading it!
Books I’ve read, and my thoughts on them.
Music I’ve heard, and my thoughts on it.
Interesting things I’ve found.
My music, written and recorded
What you can hire me for
Some way for people to subscribe to it all.
Some way for people to comment on the stuff.
What I have done myself, in programming, learning, and life.
A now page (see [https://nownownow.com]) - done!

Other things I want:

Email that lives on my domain, so you can contact me - done!
To be able to run programs in different programming languages on the server, so I can have my own little army of webservices.
I don’t want to host the website myself. I believe it is silly to host your own stuff, when it’s much better for the planet to focus that kind of thing elsewhere.
I want to make sure that I can access my email and my passwords without anything else except for my phone number - in case I lose my phone and computer in a fire!

I want to use the following stuff:

Markdown for writing stuff.
I want the website to be static.
tailwindcss for styling.
git for source control.
If I need a database, I’ll probably use postgres or mysql.
Graphql for communication between things, if applicable.
Prettier for formatting text and code.
Kubernetes and docker if applicable.

The journal:

2024-05-26 Finishing

In the end, I backed down from some of my ideas. What use is a website if it’s not online? I ended up settling on https://gohugo.io as my blog engine, because it reads markdown files and outputs a static blog. I’m hosting it on github pages for now, because that was easy to set up and they are free. The vase.art domain was premium, and I didn’t want to pay that much money, so I’m now hosted at vase.

2022-06-25 Markdown to HTML

I want to write a tool that will convert my markdown to html. I know it has been done before, by someone else, but I’ve wanted to write something in Rust for a long time, and I’m using a fairly simple subset of markdown, so it should be easy to do, and it would teach me a thing or two about rust. I’ll setup a new project and write that. The github is [https://github.

2022-06-24 DNS records

I’ve booked [vase.dev], [vase.art], and [jakobvase.dk]. I use [dns.services] as DNS hotel. Now, I want to be able to receive emails on [vase.art], and to setup [vase.dev] to forward to [vase.art]. [dns.services] allow for primary and secondary DNS. I read up on secondary DNS and decide that’s not something I need right now. Secondary DNS seems to be for duplicating your DNS to other providers, where they refer to the primary DNS and update when that updates.

2022-06-18 Domain names

Looking at domain names. I booked vase.art, but other interesting ones are .coffee .dev .click .direct .wtf .fm (but 1000/year) .la .land .life .pizza .place .red .rocks .tax .tel .town .vision .works .is .as I ended up also booking vase.dev. But I’m starting with vase.art.

2022-06-17 DNS providers

A week of work. Now back to the task at hand. I really like protonmail, because they are EU based (and they’re not lying), they really focus on privacy, and they have the option to use my own domain. As for my website, I have decided to go with a simple docker setup for now. I want to compile these markdown files to html and serve them statically. I need to figure out how to add a header and a footer as webcomponents, as that would make it a lot easier to reuse, but I’ll get there.

2022-06-11 Mail server

I want to have a mail server for emails on my domain. This is easy to set up with shared web hosting, but since I don’t want to lock myself into PHP or C#, I want to go another route. After some looking, I discover this reddit thread. Several apparently very experienced people discussing how they hate to manage a mail server and never want to do it again. Oh well.

2022-06-10 Hosting problems

I don’t know much about hosting. I’ve built websites before using shared web hosting, but this limits me to PHP, which I hate, or C# which is much too verbose and silly for me. They also handle everything related to email, and I want to do that myself So on to the great adventure of figuring this all out! I currently live in Denmark, so I start out looking for VPS providers in my vicinity.

2022-06-09 The beginning

I have decided I want my own website. This is my journal of that process. I want it to have: A blog, where I can write whatever I want. A journal of the current thing I’m working on. Books I’ve read, and my thoughts on them. Music I’ve heard, and my thoughts on it. Interesting things I’ve found. Some way for people to subscribe to it all. Some way for people to comment on the stuff.