Why did I make this site?
I think it’s a good idea for people to have a website to share their ideas, thoughts and work. You can do this on social media, but I’m a very anti social media person. I would understand if you used social media for publicity of your content, but it should be secondary to your website. Most people use social media to consume and upload their content today, but there are better alternatives. Although it’s a very old technology, and not every site offers it (see RSSBridge), RSS is still a very good way to consume your digital content. If your not sure what it is, I’ve written a paragraph at the bottom of this article about it. Personal websites are a much more robust place to upload your content.
Hosting and domain name
I’d recommend you do your own research on this, but I’m using Namecheap for my domain name, and Dartnode for my VPS. I chose to use a VPS over traditional web hosting because it gives me a bit more control and I can host my own email server. I would recommend Luke Smith’s emailwiz for your email server; I’ve had no issues with it, and it works well. You can watch his YouTube tutorial on how to use it + set up a simple website here. He uses Vultr for his hosting in this video, which I ran into some problems with: I couldn’t get them to unblock the mail ports for me. If you want some more good tutorials about self hosting do check out his landchad.net.
Making the site
I am using the static site generator HUGO with Luke Smith’s Lugo as my theme. He does have a tutorial on how to use it which is a good starting point. But as with most things in technology the best way to learn about it is to experiment with it yourself. A thing I really like about Lugo is that it generates an RSS feed for your site automatically.
RSS
If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s a protocol in which websites provide their a feed which you can add to your feed reader for it to appear in your feed. It’s an old technology that is unfortunately dying out, but it can still be used to watch YouTube videos (as well as some other mainstream sites) without an algorithm. You only get the content you want to see, and no more. You can find mine here.
Contact me
If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can find my contact details here.