A journey - Creating a website the hard way (Linux Root server - Docker compose - Wordpress - SSL certificate - Certbot - Reverse Proxy)
Part 1 - So many options ... Wordpress, Django, MERN or Bubble? Hi everyone, over the last days I have mostly focused on the career and business side of things. Because knowing a lot is only one side of the coin, being able to present yourself well on Linkedin or a personal website is just as important. With this in mind I have thought to myself that it is really high time for me (especially for me as a consultant) to create a homepage, 1) to talk about the usual stuff, my skills, my service offering, testimonials, ... all the stuff you have on a run-of-the-mill freelancer website 2) to showcase some small Python poc (proof-of-concepts), some scripts I want to deploy on my website to show my skills I have not finished this project, but I like to share with you my thoughts and my progress. It has all turned out to be super complicated, but it was a learning experience and, well, I will be curious to see the chapter of Dave to see a more easy and straightforward way. So as a starting point I was confronted with four questions: 1. Should I do it myself? Definitely yes, doing it myself will allow me to learn, it will save money, and given that I have to explain things to a webdeveloper anyway I will probably not spent too much extra time (or so I thought) 2. How do I want to implement it from a technical pov? This is the focus of this text/thread 3. What is the content? I am not there yet, but I plan not to reinvent the wheel, rather find a couple of websites from "competitors" I like and present similar content. As concerns the POCs I will present whatever script I develop for myself, and that are interesting to others 4. What design? something simple ... this leads nicely back to question 2 I hope you are still with me and I am not too verboose. So concerning the technical implementation I had the following chain of thought: - The website is supposed to look good (design), so I need some CMS that allows me to re-use existing themes to quickly get to some results. Plus, I want wysiwig functionality. This basically disqualifies all the micro frameworks, like Flask, Gradio, ... while Streamlit is too simple. - So basically I am left with Wordpress, Wix, Bubble, Django, and maybe some Javascript Frameworks for static websites like Astro. As concerns Javascript based webbuilding, I do not really know about the "Gui based development environments" that exist in this context. Maybe there are some managed hosting solutions, I do not know. Maybe it is smart to have a "JS + Headless CMS solution", but all this is way too complicated for me. - Wix, Bubble and all these website builders want you to pay quite some money. So they are out. What is more, they do not have the huge ecosystem that Django and Wordpress have. - Django is a great framework, it has a Backend, admin panel, and with Mezzanine, and Wagtail you also have some CMS frameworks. So if I had more time I would go for Django and learn it inside out. - The more pragmatic solution however is Wordpress. It is also a good skill to have.