Setting up a website - ERE style

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guitarplayer
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Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by guitarplayer »

Forgive me the thread as I suspect this has been asked before. What would be the things to look at to build a resilient low maintenance website.

Monetizing would not be a priority, hands off maintenance would be a priority. Understanding the parts that go into it to the greatest extent possible would also be a priority.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Some ideas from a non expert:
WordPress.com or blogger.com free hosting. They take care of all the work, you just type your message. Very low maintenance. Resilient unless WordPress/Google have a big screw up or shut down the service. Not transparent.

If you use R people like blogdown/Hugo. I've heard it is resilient because if something goes wrong you just rerun your code and upload the whole thing again so very resilient. You do have to get and manage hosting it though so some maintenance. Very transparent. There is probably a way to do this in python too.

WordPress on paid hosting is a very common website solution but in my opinion it is not that low maintenance or resilient. Very transparent.

jacob
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by jacob »

guitarplayer wrote:
Sun Jan 08, 2023 3:21 am
What would be the things to look at to build a resilient low maintenance website.
What do you want to do with it?

If/when I ever make a new site, I'd very likely handcode it 1995-style and it'd look something like http://paulgraham.com/ or https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

The resilience comes from being able to store it on a floppy disk, excuse me USB drive, and upload it wherever I want. It could even be hosted on an arduino ala lowtech magazine's solar server.

guitarplayer
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by guitarplayer »

Thanks. I have two websites in my mind.

@jacob, the first one is on a subject. For this one, it might be a good idea to take into account appearance to some extent. The second one is personal and appearance should not matter.

The first one:

@GdP, yeah I am learning R now on many fronts! Might look into it blogdown/Hugo.
Otherwise, some questions (remember I am a rookie)
- what's the incentive for WordPress.com or blogger.com to provide free hosting? i.e. what is under the hood of 'transparent'?
- For blogdown/Hugo, by betting and managing hosting, should I understand finding a server and paying them to store my files?
- In any case, whatever website I guild, can I buy an available great website name and give the website the name?

The second one:

Could have the same format as paul graham's i.e. http://namesurname.com. Here appearance does not matter and it would be good to have total control over this. This would basically be my presence on the Internet, same way I am present in the physical world by the means of the body. So I would like to have control over it like I have over my body.
- would I write the code and then find a server to host the code, links and files? How do I find servers?
- I assume it is easy to assign the http://namesurname.com address to my website?
Last edited by guitarplayer on Sun Jan 08, 2023 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

To run a website you need a few things:
1. A domain name like namesurname.com. You pay a Domain registrar to do this, usually by the year.
2. Content. You can code this yourself like Jacob says or you can use a content management system (software) to make it so you type out what you want the way you do in Microsoft word, no coding needed.
3. Hosting. A server to store and deliver the content when requested by a users browser. Usually you pay for this by the month. You can also host it yourself on your own computer. Jacob gives the example of using an Arduino.

Not sure why blogger and WordPress will run a website for free for you.

I think you can rule out blogger and WordPress free because you can't have namesurname.com. It has to be WordPress.com/namesurname or something similar on those services. With those services you don't buy a domain name and you don't buy separate hosting. It is an all in one service.

Using r you would still need to get a domain name and hosting. R just creates the files that you load into the hosting. r works as a sort of content management system.

You can find a server but googling website hosting. GoDaddy, blue host, HostGator used to be big ones. You may also have a local company or you could host on your own computer. Many of this hosting companies can provide everything. They will sell you a domain name, sell you hosting, and install a free content management system for you to use.

You shouldn't have a problem connecting the domain and hosting. Typically you will be using the same company as registrar and host so they will be set up to make this easy.

guitarplayer
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by guitarplayer »

Cool, thanks @GdP. I will also ask DW, she is studying cybersecurity now and once told me that hosting on one's personal computer exposes to certain risks, will investigate.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain this to me.

TopHatFox
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by TopHatFox »

Spend 100-200 hours learning HTML (website structure), CSS (website appearance), and JavaScript (website interactivity) via TeamTreeHouse.com ($25/mo) or the FreeCodeCamp channel on YouTube. Wordpress is cool and all, but you don’t learn how to do anything or how websites work. Wordpress also owns your site and can shut you down, lock you out, etc., more easily than if you upload the site. You can make a nice site with some basic CSS and HTML; they don’t have to look like the sites ppl used to make in the 90’s.

Tyler9000
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by Tyler9000 »

I use Wordpress.com and have been very happy with it.

The CEO of Automattic was a co-founder of the same Wordpress that you can install on your own, so they know what they're doing. They handle all of the server maintenance behind the scenes and it's about as hands-off as you can get. And they also have paid options to scale up your control once you get to that point. For example, I currently use their Business plan and have full control of any additional plugins just like a standalone Wordpress install. I started with the free plan and upgrading as I grew was super easy. And cost-wise it seems like good value for what it offers.

mathiverse
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by mathiverse »

jacob wrote:
Sun Jan 08, 2023 8:42 am
If/when I ever make a new site, I'd very likely handcode it 1995-style and it'd look something like http://paulgraham.com/ or https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Here is another great blog in this bloatless style: https://danluu.com/

mathiverse
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by mathiverse »

guitarplayer wrote:
Sun Jan 08, 2023 9:06 am
- what's the incentive for WordPress.com or blogger.com to provide free hosting? i.e. what is under the hood of 'transparent'?
Wordpress hosts your site for free and in return they are allowed to put ads they earn income from on your website. You can pay for an ad-free subscription if you don't want that to happen. I'd venture a guess that blogger.com is similar.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Blogger/blogspot doesn't have any ads but you can include your own. It is free. Google owns it. The costs to run blogger/blogspot are probably a rounding error for them.

avalok
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by avalok »

@guitarplayer you can host static content (HTML, CSS, JS) using Azure static websites for free. It supports custom domains, but I think you need to host your code in a git repository. I wouldn't be surprised if there was also an equivalent for other cloud services.

The docs heavily suggest using some frontend framework, but I'd also just stick to naked HTML, CSS, JS; the frameworks have a very high turnover and are a lot of pain to accept for small projects.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by mountainFrugal »

Google now has free basic hosting with some fairly slick and very simply drag and drop designs if you buy a domain through them: https://domains.google/
I had to make a few websites for projects quickly this year and went that route.

My personal website and blog is written in hugo/blogdown if you want to go that route I can send some resources your way.

guitarplayer
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by guitarplayer »

Many advises, I am very grateful to all.

I have an estimate 50h formal training in HTML and CSS but do not know javascript (as in, I saw javascript code in my training but have been told to 'just write it in the curly brackets'). I am a pretty quick independent learner if I put my mind into things though. I also have all the materials from that training. In fact, in it I built a website in Django, but I am not sure I have the strength to operate in Python environment at the moment because I am taking in lots of new things already.

I read a bit about hugo/blogdown and also bookdown and generating html reports. I think this might work well for tightening my wog at the moment so yes @mF some resources would be great! Software carpentry worked very well for me last summer.

/*** On a tangent, I have been looking into GIS with R i.e. producing maps of 'x occurrences of y in z region', this might be also in the software carpentry workshops in the one about reproducible analysis. I also have a website of one guy who studied at one of the unis I was at who makes many maps like this and publishes code. ***/

loutfard
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by loutfard »

Github pages:
- free
- includes ssl certs
- rather good static site generator builtin
- fast
- decent cdn behind it
- limited learning curve

guitarplayer
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by guitarplayer »

Thanks @loutfard, welcome to posting on the forum!

fingeek
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by fingeek »

I'd vote for something like WordPress.com (free to host a page for personal use) or blogger.com too yes. Something like $3/month will allow you a custom domain name, and is a good basis for establishing yourself and learning. You can always migrate the data to a different platform if you choose to dig in further.

If you do decide to go the more custom approach, useful to note that letsencrypt.org gives you a free SSL certificate (which gives you the Https/secure website)

OutOfTheBlue
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

You can publish static websites with content written in Markdown through GitHub Pages or GitLab Pages,

The former does not allow commercial uses, the latter does (you can check their about page for more info).

Need to use some static site generator or framework.

Cost: none except for the domain name.

Edit: Sorry, just saw loutfard's post. And I thought I was following this thread!

recal
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by recal »

I agree that a static website using something like Hugo with posts written in Markdown are the most resilient and cheapest. Fundamentally, you can always read the files since they're basically plain text rather than parsing through some kind of template language that may not exist in 10 years. (This was more of a concern 10 years ago than now, things are stabilizing in the web world now.) I would not recommend Wordpress or Blogger since your data is pretty locked into their platforms and it's difficult to transfer it.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Setting up a website - ERE style

Post by mountainFrugal »

Update: For a basic static website I now think www.quarto.org is the way to go. Blogdown is R specific and works on .Rmd documents mostly with HUGO. Quarto is pretty slick and still based on simple text files (.qmd in this case, but .Rmd or .md work fine!). Quarto is stand alone and is the next iteration of .Rmd static doc publishing. Quarto is more language agnostic allowing you to switch between R, Julia, Python, etc and render code and output. It integrates with many of the code editors for these languages (VScode, RStudio, Jupyter etc.). One of the coolest features though is that it ships with pandoc to render websites, books, pdfs, presentations, docx etc. or whatever with the content that you make. I am currently converting my hugo/blogdown website over due to this publishing flexibility.

Host the site on github or netlify for free (your username) if you do not want a custom domain (other cost).

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