Website Uplift
My Experience assembling a blog on the cheap and with no experience
Early October 2020 I bought a domain at Go Daddy and started to put together a site to summarize my experience building the msg and also as a place to aggregate information for anyone trying to build one. My experience with building sites was limited to a Drupal site I put together around 2009 to lease apartments.. and from what I gathered there have been some changes to how sites are built in the meantime. My first build was a GitHub Page, using the following tech:
- GitHub, Github Desktop
- GoDaddy (Domain and email server)
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Bootstrap
- Visual Studio Code
All of these options are free and you can great support at w3schools , so a site like that should be doable at no cost beyond the mental health issues that come from working with code
The site was ok for about 5 pages, with a decent navigation bar (bootstrap) and a fancy-ish dark theme mode I put together by writing a JavaScript that toggled the css. The problem was that if you didn't have blazing fast internet, the css switch created a horrendous flash. After a couple of weeks of running the site, it was obvious that having to assemble every HTML page manually was more craft than I intended to do for this site, so I started to learn more about modern sites. The current site uses the following tech:
- Next.js (i.e. JavaScript, React)
- Strapi (CMS)
- Styled Components
- Heroku (Back end deploy)
- PostgreSQL (DB)
- Vercel (front end deploy)
- AWS S3 (Amazon service for file storage, images and videos for this site)
- CKEditor
- GitHub, Github Desktop
- GoDaddy (Domain and email server)
- HTML
- CSS
- Bootstrap
- Visual Studio Code (IDE)
The options above are free-ish, in the sense that so far I haven't had to pay anything for any of them (I did some attempts using AWS EC2 and other things that cost me a buck of two but they aren't in the list of what I ended up using). That said they are mostly the inferior tier of some package offering, so your mileage may vary in terms of costs if you go with this route.
February 2021 Update: On months where I get a few days with 500-1k visitors per day, I do actually run against the AWS S3 free tier level. So far I paid about $15 in AWS since October, mostly from the periods where I released new stuff and got people checking it out. Quiet months are still free.
Thanks for checking this out and reach out if you give a go at anything like this or know of ways to improve it!