Website - teaching myself... stuff

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-22 23:22:13

I have a website up and running (hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.net) that I am using as a testing ground for learning css, javascript, php, and whatever. At the moment, to the trained eye, the site looks pretty pedestrian. But it will get better because I bothered to tell you about it, and on the off chance one or two of you might check in on it I will have to make good.

As an aside, I ran my wife's new site (which I built using WordPress) on a netbook running bunsenlabs and Apache for about a week. It was just a stunt, but it was fun while it lasted. The site is now hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

C#Coder4ever · 2016-01-22 23:42:36

I don't know about you, but I personally would still host the websites on hardware that is in fact yours. But other than that, neat stuff! Better than what I've got going on lol.

Horizon_Brave · 2016-01-22 23:43:29

Good on you! I'm in the same boat really. Though I'm not really keen on learning PHP, Javascript or any of the web/dev stuff, I'm trying to teach myself (and roping in those on this forum), more about Linux/Unix itself, it's fundamentals, scripting, and administration. (also Networking and routing I'm learning as well) So, kudoo's to you. These days, I use OneNote to try to keep a very large database of things I learn, concepts and syntax of commands etc. For you, creating the site from the 'bottom up' is a great idea, as it'll grow as your skills improve. Very proud to see that you've constructed the site from hand. So many auto generated HTML/CSS, It's good to know how and what the tags, and source do in my opinion.. The same goes for my scripting learning. I'd really really hate to memorize a bunch of syntax but have absolutely no clue as to what it does or how it works. Anyway that's my soapbox speech. Congrats, keep on with the site, and welcome aboard!

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-22 23:57:46

C#Coder4ever wrote:

... I personally would still host the websites on hardware that is in fact yours. But other than that, neat stuff! Better than what I've got going on lol.

Hosting on my own hardware is an inclination, hence the attempt. Since I do not own adequate gear at the moment, I decided to go for a stable solution: mainly because of my wife's website. I like NFSN. It's a good fit.

Last edited by jamesyo0304 (2016-01-23 01:56:48)

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-23 00:06:04

Horizon_Brave wrote:

Good on you! I'm in the same boat really. Though I'm not really keen on learning PHP, Javascript or any of the web/dev stuff, I'm trying to teach myself (and roping in those on this forum), more about Linux/Unix itself, it's fundamentals, scripting, and administration.

Thank you! Getting deeper into Linux/Unix is also a goal. I need to spend more time poring over this forum. I will look for your posts and subscribe to a thread or two. At some point in the future I want to incorporate my Linux experience into the website project. I am finding that the different areas of my discovered interests in preparing for this venture have been converging. Without overstating it, it seems to mostly lead back to Linux and OpenSource values.

Last edited by jamesyo0304 (2016-01-23 01:54:44)

Horizon_Brave · 2016-01-23 00:40:45

jamesyo0304 wrote:

Thank you! Getting deeper into Linux/Unix is also a goal. I need to spend more time poring over this forum. I will look for your posts and subscribe to a thread or two. At some point in the future I want to incorporate my Linux experience into the website project. I am finding that the different areas of my discovered interests in preparing for this venture have been converging. Without overstating it, it seems to mostly lead back to Linux and OpenSource values.

lol, well my posts are usually questions, and inquiries...

Last edited by Horizon_Brave (2016-01-23 01:08:21)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-01-23 00:45:59

@Horizon_Brave & @jamesyo0304

Please try to avoid using full quoting in simple replies, it makes threads more difficult to follow.

Thank you

Horizon_Brave · 2016-01-23 01:08:51

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

@Horizon_Brave & @jamesyo0304
Please try to avoid using full quoting in simple replies, it makes threads more difficult to follow.
Thank you

Apologies, and fix'd.

deleted0 · 2016-01-23 01:28:24

jamesyo0304 wrote:

As an aside, I ran my wife's new site (which I built using WordPress) on a netbook running bunsenlabs and Apache for about a week. It was just a stunt, but it was fun while it lasted. The site is now hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Wow, Joanne's sea creatures are amazing! And thanks for the mention of NearlyFreeSpeech.net, just what I needed.

8bit

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-23 02:03:13

eight.bit wrote:

Wow, Joanne's sea creatures are amazing!
8bit

Thanks! She's got talent. Hidden talent. Trying to change that!

Last edited by jamesyo0304 (2016-01-23 02:03:50)

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-23 02:06:58

Horizon_Brave wrote:

well my posts are usually questions...

Well... yeah... and people answer them!

brontosaurusrex · 2016-01-23 07:30:48

I went through this (running away from wordpress):

- Do a blog from scratch (build bash engine, which was slow but kinda working) and actually had a nice search-engine like index.
- Realized that without some sort of web interface, writing blogs would be really boring, slow, ....
- Long pause, almost went back to wordpress
- Back to drawing board, did some research on how people blog in 2015/2016
- After a while reading about jekyll and similar solutions realized that there is 3rd party service called tinypress, which could be used to post to github hosted jekyll page.
- The idea to write jekyll template from scratch, got bored, since it is not only about jekyll, but building a mobile friendly site < more that I was prepared to deal with
- Evil hackish plans growing, decided to go with more "Do it fast to get something working, fix it later" approach. < It went really really fast from this point on.
- Found lanyon theme https://github.com/poole/lanyon , uploaded it and add some posts using tinypress
- Changing the theme slightly > at this point there is a working / online blog without even running jekyll offline on my machine http://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2016/0 … ress-post/
- Realized that tinypress has bugs and lacks features (concluded that with some workarounds it is still good enough for scribble posts, which can be later fixed offline with a real text editor or perhaps using github's online one) < 99% of my posts are quick scribbles anyway, so no big deal.
Edit: tinypress replaced with prose.io.
- Being annoyed by the jekyll's idea of "front matter", I mean can't this be automatic or what ..., realized that included metadata is basically a good thing, posts are actually engine-independent on the long run. Saw that github understands "front matter" at some level. Edit: prose.io deals with frontmatter automagically as well if configured corectly.
- Actually installed jekyll offline to do some more problematic positioning of the elements and some other hacks to the theme.

Now the posting speed is almost equal to using wordpress (after about 20 days of using this), decided that images should all be hosted by 3rd party providers (thanks to scrots.moe).

Cons:
- Google is slow to index the site, so my "google this page" thingy is kinda useless. Edit: This is highly related to the fact that I don't have a top level domain for this blog.
- Slightly complicated posting (compared to wordpress).

Pros:
- Obviously using git my site is fully backuped on multiple machines.
- Hosted by not-me, so I don't have to deal with boring server security (should be easily regenerated and uploaded to any server if github drops).

p.s. Sorry for long post and choose wisely, not that it matters, nobody but you will read it anyway

Last edited by brontosaurusrex (2016-07-21 06:49:33)

ohnonot · 2016-01-23 12:02:39

^ at least for me that was a very interesting read, thanks bronto.

o9000 · 2016-01-23 18:59:39

twoion wrote:

Also I suck at website design, that's why it looks like it does.

It looks fine. Clean and tidy. Just one suggestion: it's a bit strange how the top menu works. If you click on 'Repositories', you end up on another domain, with another logo and a different top menu.

@jamesyo0304

Joanne's work is beautiful!

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-01-23 19:15:05

twoion wrote:

I suck at website design

No, you don't {)

I love this site

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-24 00:26:06

ohnonot wrote:

^ a very interesting read, thanks bronto.

Yes!

jamesyo0304 · 2016-01-24 00:35:15

twoion wrote:

The secret sauce behind bunsenlabs.org is just pandoc

!

Getting great stuff in the thread... and need to echo admiration for this site!

I am leaning toward a simple approach... which will come out at the end of this journey. In the meantime, things will get dicey.

#1 2016-01-22 23:22:13

Website - teaching myself... stuff

#2 2016-01-22 23:42:36

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#3 2016-01-22 23:43:29

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#4 2016-01-22 23:57:46

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#5 2016-01-23 00:06:04

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#6 2016-01-23 00:40:45

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#7 2016-01-23 00:45:59

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#8 2016-01-23 01:08:51

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#9 2016-01-23 01:28:24

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#10 2016-01-23 02:03:13

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#11 2016-01-23 02:06:58

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#12 2016-01-23 07:30:48

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#13 2016-01-23 12:02:39

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#14 2016-01-23 18:59:39

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#15 2016-01-23 19:15:05

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

#16 2016-01-24 00:26:06

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#17 2016-01-24 00:35:15

Re: Website - teaching myself... stuff

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