I set up my website in February 2022 and made some notes that I was intending to craft into a more cohesive post at the time. By this point it’s been over a year and strangely enough the below hasn’t taken the initiative to gain sentience and become more cohesive of its own accord (rude), but I don’t want it languishing in Google Keep forever, so with some light edits, here it is.
For hosting, I went with the legendarily non-user-friendly NearlyFreeSpeech, mostly because of their pricing structure (less traffic = less dolla) and also because I like a challenge. I’m not doing any backend stuff, I don’t even know what a PHP is, so the chances of needing support are minimal (unless I accidentally delete my subdomain, er, more on that later). First thing to do was set up the account and add some funds: I put 25 dollars in and nearly 20 of that went right away on domain registration and whois protection, which was fair enough. (After that I got two dollars back from typo bounty hunting – my true calling. Tell me you’re a humanities person who does computer stuff for a hobby without telling me you’re a … etc.) Since then, I’ve had it set up to email me whenever the funds go below 5 USD, which is ample time for me to put some more in. Over 15 months I’ve spent a grand total of $43.59 on this site, $27.26 of which has been domain registration, so I’m certainly happy enough with that.
I went for a non-production static site, because I don’t need any backend stuff and again, less dolla – basically, the kind of site I could host on GitHub Pages for free. So why didn’t I host it on GitHub Pages for free? I didn’t want to have to bother with git in a context where I’m not concerned about version control, there wasn’t much point in exposing the raw HTML (not that people can’t just ctrl-u for that, but there we are), I wanted it to play nicely with the domain name, which was easily registered through NFS, and after years of faffing around using Jekyll for my professional webpages due to Bad Decisions I just didn’t want to go near that here. Look, I just want to hand code everything like it’s 2002.
Next thing to do was register the domain name. Praze means “field” in that language I speak – an online garden for me to plant my shite in; .net is the best TLD, change my mind. For some reason the fact that you can just invent a subdomain on the control panel blew my mind. You can just will subdomains into existence, amazing. Tre is a variation on an online pseudonym I’ve been using for about ten years; I could have just shoved everything straight under praze.net but subdomains are a trademark of the Old Internet and, as mentioned above, it’s 2002. After that I was required to set tre.praze.net as the “canonical” URL for reasons I have forgotten but which were probably important.
The only way to upload/create content is via the command line (not pictured: me, rubbing my hands with techbro glee). NFS told me what the username and domain were for SSH and I made the inspired guess that the command was ssh username@domain and guess what, it was. The first thing to do was set up HTTPS, which, I discovered, is apparently actually called TLS. This was extremely easy (and free, even though it seems like most services force you to pay for it). When it came to adding actual content, the first thing I did was create some error pages. I had to make an .htaccess file for this, although I knew nothing about Apache and still don’t. I’m a bit suspicious of the way it looks (this is a note from last year and I’m not sure what I was referring to … potentially camel case??), but, Apache.
Moving stuff onto the server requires scp and putting in my SSH password every time, although maybe if I didn’t deliberately use a really minimal terminal emulator this wouldn’t be an issue. For editing pages that are already on the server I use Emacs on the terminal, which is also ok, but I wish I could use my usual GUI Emacs with everything how I want it … I’ve tried using tramp several times but it always hangs for me regardless of all the weird fixes I attempt for it.
If ~lissajous ever wants his own space on the server, we have two options: 1, set up another site, although it would have to be a production one and would cost quite a bit more (although still, like, next to nothing). 2, keep stuff in the same site, turn off forced redirection and turn on alias-specific pages, then move all my stuff into a /tre subdirectory and his into an /adt one. I’m not sure how things would work regarding canonical URLs in this case – would we be able to set the bare domain as another alias? (This is irrelevant because if ~lissajous ever does decide to get his own website he’ll definitely do something like build his own physical server to run it from and then deliberately install a bizarre operating system on it. Contrary to appearances I am not the techbro in this relationship.)
About a month in I accidentally deleted the subdomain, because you can do this in one click from the control panel. Getting it back was fine, although getting the TLS back took some time. But it returned eventually.
Now, over a year later, the site finally has a proper homepage. There are still lots of things I’d like to add but either haven’t thought through fully or just haven’t done enough work to share them yet. It’s a work in progress! Just a field for my shite.