If you’re seeing this page, welcome to my living room! You are here:
Due to a combined “urge to better learn how the internet works” and “constant need to be working on a project at all times or I’ll freak out”, I recently decided it was time to ditch my expensive Squarespace subscription and my useless web hosting service and see if I could build and host a website from the ground up.
I ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 with a little case, a fan hat, and a big honkin’ 256GB microSD card and eagerly got to work. With a heart full of hope and a pep in my step, I immediately hit a wall. Every time I would get a few steps in, I would experience major data corruption on the SD card. The fault points were different each time and seemingly happened at random. After banging my head against the wall for a while and nearly giving up, I eventually discovered that I had purchased a FAKE microSD card off of Amazon. Instead of being 256GB, it was actually only 32GB of storage but was indexed to appear to be 256GB. Very tricky. For the 100th time in my life I was taught the lesson to give a seemingly too-good-to-be-true deal a bit of scrutiny. We’ll see if it sticks.
After fumbling through the return process, I managed to get a real microSD card and was off to the races. Following a handful of online tutorials, I installed the Raspberry Pi OS with a LAMP stack, and was able to drop a nice “COMING SOON” message on seanholloway.com. After setting up a few more bells and whistles like dynamic DNS service, TLS certificates, security upgrades, and a VPN server, I could procrastinate actually building the website no longer.
I like making things, but actual aesthetic design is very, very challenging for me, so the first and main goal of the website was just to get all the information across. I’ve never used HTML or CSS before, and I didn’t want to use a code generator or pre-built site, so this ended up taking a long time. I certainly learned a lot about the nuances of CSS, and now have a much deeper appreciation for how much more it does than just list the colors and font sizes of a site. In the future, I hope to learn more about web design so that I can at LEAST add some color to my front page. The contact form was more fun and natural for me, and it was enjoyable to dip my toes in Javascript and PHP.
ith those two pages wrapped up, I installed WordPress onto the server, both for my own use in posting regular updates like these, but also so that someday I can hopefully help out my friends with paid WordPress websites by giving them free hosting.
You know, to make this feel like it wasn’t JUST to kill time.