Making websites is not easy

This website was made as a fun little project because namecheap had a sale on the ’tel-aviv.world’ domain name.

Creating the website

I was looking around for cheap domain names that would be available and stumbled across this domain. We’ll see how this domain name will age but maybe eventually i will change it to something a little more appropriate and mature, as one day i almost hope to use this website for college applications or a job or something along those lines.

After securing the domain name for a grand total of $2.98 i embarked on my journey towards this website:

1. First and foremost i had to set up a custom email address which is now kevin@tel-aviv.world which is just an address through namecheap that routes back to a spam email address i made in gmail.

2. Second, i created a new virtual machine instance through Oracle Cloud, which i had previously set up in order to host a minecraft server

   • i used the ARM 64 architecture and Oracle linux 9
   • I had previously setup a subnet for the minecraft server which made setting up ingress rules and the likes go a lot smoother than it would have if i had not done this. Do not ask me how to do this, i do not remember.
   • I went through the steps of using puttygen in order to make a .ppk key and ssh into the oracle cloud vm instance, and then got to work on developing the website.

3. The Website was made with hugo, nginx, and a prayer

   • to be super honest, i do not remember a ton about how i did this part of the setup and creation of the website.
   • i pretty much just setup an nginx server on the oracle cloud instance and then conked out for the night.

4. The development of the actual website and setting up hugo as well as trial and error with certbot.

   • I don’t claim to be anywhere near even a novice with web hosting and the likes so im certain that pretty much any experienced server-hoster(?) would have a heart attack if they looked at my file structure
   • at first i attempted to use jekyll in order to run my website as a static site generator but i couldn’t find any interesting themes so i switched to hugo. Hugo was actually way easier to setup so i would recommend using that
   • next i wanted to get my website secured in order to use https. i did this using certbot but it took me like an hour and a half of troubleshooting to actually get it installed and working in a lengthy process which i don’t feel like recalling at this momen
   • after finally getting my https and everything all set up, i’ve been customizing the theme and messing around with markdown and stuff

Conclusion and the future

I do eventually want this website to be an interesting collection of various projects i plan on doing in the future. I will probably make a category of posts which involves photodumps surrounding hangouts with my friends or images of projects i’m currently undergoing. Soon i’ll probably be embarking on making a DIY guitar pedal and in the not so far future i would love to go in depth into building a car and decking it out for track days.

Thank you for reading

-kevin

_{Volvo S60R, i would love this car}