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This Website

Documenting a work in progres

Goals for barnold.xyz #

  • To understand modern websites and web3. I learn best by doing
  • Fun project to provide a way for friends to see this week’s menu plan
    • Can I use the menu plans as a jumping off point for an NFT collection? Something else

Setting up the website #

Design and setup decisions #

  • Bought the domain barnold.xyz from namecheap
  • Selected Hugo as the framework based on recommendations from chatGPT. It came down to Hugo or react but I thought static sites would be easier to mirror on IPFS or similar services if I wanted (that may or may not be true!). I also wanted the site to be fast and have no tracking/cookies or extraneous scripting. I’ll hold myself to the no-tracking standard. TBD on the scripts.

Getting a hello world online #

  • Started going through the Hugo QuickStart guide. Got stuck on step 1 of the Prerequisites, “Install Hugo”. Turns out my computer’s command line developer tools were broken. Reinstalling them didn’t help things. Eventually I figured out that I had to upgrade my OS which allowed me to complete the install
  • Hosting: ChatGPT suggested I use Netlify for hosting so I went with that
  • Next step was to connect Netlify to GitHub. No problems there
  • Next up: push the website to GitHub. Big problems here
  • Can’t figure out how to authenticate myself to GitHub on the command line. Eventually find the GitHub CLI which gets me sorted out
  • BOOM: the QuickStart website is on Netlify
  • But barnold.xyz doesn’t show it
  • Netlify has some instructions for how to point my domain to them. Namecheap has some explanations for what the various options mean. After spending some time reading and ChatGPTing, I think I want to point the CNAME to netlify. Now I just have to wait up to 24hrs for the DNS changes to disseminate (ENS doesn’t have that issue!)
  • BOOM: the QuickStart website is on barnold.xyz

Trying a theme, making my actual website #

  • [congo fun]

Observations #

  • DNS taking 24hrs to propagate changes is the sort of issue you’d never hear the end of if a crypto system worked that way
  • ChatGPT helped me power through a couple of non-fun blockers that might have ended this experiment early
  • Actually creating the content is a lot more fun than trying to decipher where in the directory structure Hugo wants me to put some files, and why every single one needs to be called ‘index.md’. Quite confusing to have 4 separate files open with the same name.
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