Why I built my own website

Earlier this year I was inspired by Isaac‘s personal website. It made me think about building my own website again and how I could do things differently. I know it may seem like I missed the boat on making a blog, by at least a decade, but it’s about more than that. Over the past few years, everyone’s presence on the web has been consolidated under the control of a small number of tech companies, and you don’t own what you put on those sites. I believe in an internet where people have a right to own what they write, create and post. Web technologies have advanced to where there are myriad options for no-code website solutions. I left social media sites in 2017, but I still like the idea of having a presence online and having a place to have a voice.

Now I can focus on the content, and my mind is jumping at the possibilities. I already want to practice writing again. I haven’t structured a piece of writing since college. I barely remember the topic, supporting ideas and things like that. This is exciting. I’ve wanted to get back into this, but I haven’t had the motivation or reason.

So I set out to build a website with the following requirements

• Open-source and light weight stack
• Shorter domain name and a more unique top-level domain
• Analytics (but not Google Analytics)
• Free web hosting

Open-source and light weight stack

I had heard about Hugo over the years and loved the idea of a static site that’s generated from Markdown files, so I chose that. It was an easy choice because I take notes and organize my life in Obsidian, which is a Markdown-based note taking program. It’s also open-source under an Apache 2.0 license, so tick on that box, too.

I went with the Paper them by 南小北 for it’s clean look, blog post layout and the light and dark theme switcher.

The backend being light weight was important because I’ve used WordPress and Drupal over the years and I knew that I didn’t need that kind of power. There was so much to get lost in, whether it was finding the right theme, installing plugins, or self-hosting versus paying for WordPress.com. Having my own static files to host cuts out a lot of the cruft, leaving more time to write content and share what I’m passionate about.

Shorter domain name and a more unique top-level domain

I used my domain registrar of choice, Porkbun, for their quality and transparency. I chose the domain name jlmc.space starting with my initials and ending in .space because I liked the idea of it being a space for me online. Let’s ignore the nod to MySpace, yeah?

Analytics (but not Google Analytics)

I went with Umami because it’s user-friendly, open-source and has a focus on privacy. I wanted to avoid Google Analytics because it’s bloated and overkill for my needs. I just want a rough idea of how many people are visiting my site to see if it’s getting any traffic, and maybe use that as a signal for what content to write more of.

Free web hosting

Gone are the days where I’m paying nearly $200 USD for a website when it’s not a revenue generator for me. I’m looking at you Squarespace. I chose Netlify because they have a free tier that lets me build from a Git repo.