How to make your own website
As the first blog entry I am going to do something that I probably won’t do again: talk about something other than video game development.
For a long time I have had this idea in my head of making a personal website where I can have a blog to dump ideas, knowledge, suggestions or whatever comes to mind and at the same time where I can upload links and descriptions of projects, whether they are published games, prototypes, technical demos, etc.
I wanted something relatively simple, but self-made and maintainable (there would be no point in being able to build the site without being able to make entries or fix things as technologies are updated). I evaluated many options, from WordPress to something made with Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages, just like the genius of Adrián, does, whose blog I 100% recommend (and he’s one of the people who inspired me to make my own). However, no solution was convincing enough for me… until a fellow programmer who works in frontend told me “don’t you know Astro?”, and after an exhaustive investigation (3 google searches or rather duckduckgoeadas and 2 short YouTube videos) I said to myself “this is what I was looking for”.
Disclaimer in advance: I’m not going to teach you how to build the site or publish it in this post, basically because I’m a total and complete novice with Astro, as well as someone who hasn’t touched the frontend with a broomstick for 13 years. I’m going to do something better, leave you the resources that allowed me to make this site, and believe me, if I could do it, anyone with a minimum knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS can too. Of course… the knowledge has to be there or acquired beforehand, without these bases it can be a painful process and it will hardly come to fruition.
So, here’s a list of resources I used to get to this result:
- This excellent Astro course that I found on YouTube. You can see the playlist here.
- This template that I found on this page
And that’s it, nothing more.
The course allows you to understand the concepts and fundamentals of Astro (at the end of the course you should have your own blog ready) and the template allows you to have a starting point. Combining the latter with the fact that I understood it thanks to the course is that I was able to customize it to my liking (remove some sections, add another, stylize certain things, change the theme, etc.).
I hope this can be useful to someone who was looking for a framework, technology, tool or whatever to be able to build their own website. As I told you, I didn’t intend to teach anything, but rather to indicate where you can go and also, as always, I like to tell my students: “The worst thing is not knowing that you don’t know, at least now you know that you don’t know something and you’re one step closer to learning it.”
Credits: Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik