If you haven't yet, I recommend reading the About page of this site, just so you know what you're getting into!
For day one of my “build as you learn” site, I’m going with the most minimum site I can build – a few HTML pages, styled with a little CSS (mainly Bootstrap).
For the most part, I’m going to build everything, but I’m going to use some frameworks as I go. But since I need to learn those frameworks, and the goal here is to make constant progress now that I’ve started, I’m starting very small.
That said, I am not a designer. I have no desire to be a designer. My goals in code are geared more toward Backend development, so I’m using Bootstrap for styles instead of trying to build all my CSS from the ground up.
Initially, this will be a static site – I’ll be manually updating all new posts on the home page. Obviously this is going to get old VERY quickly, so the next version of this site (and the subject of the next series of my posts) will be dedicated to learning a Python based site generator named Pelican to eliminate this pain in the ass.
That said, I'm extremely excited to have gotten this far. Building the home page, this post, the about page, and the contact page has taken me all day (at least around 8 hours), but I'm thrilled to see my work.
So all that I accomplished on this first day:
- Purchased and setup the domain She Builds With Code.com.
- Downloaded my personal html boilerplate code from my GitHub repo.
- Wrote my about page and this post
- It was really important to me to write before I got too tired, so it came before I dove into code.
- Created and integrated my signup forms for MailChimp
- Don't forget to sign up for updates!
- Created my Contact page, using a service called Formspree.
- Installed Matomo Web Analytics (open source web analytics)
- Uploaded the site to a GitHub repo
- Used cPanel's Git integration to upload my site to my A2 Hosting account.
Not a ton of coding today, not surprising considering the setup needed to get started.The cool thing is after typing my own HTML today, I have finally remembered what the HTML snippet is to open a link in a new tab. It's target="_blank".
In addition to learning Pelican, I'll also be looking at adding comment functionality. Initially, I thought about using a 3rd party program like Disqus, but this site is going to go through so many changes as I learn. I didn't like the idea of not owning the content on my site - I'd run the risk of losing all of it if I decided to switch after things had gotten started!
Thanks for sticking around. I'm excited to see where we go from here.