My First Blog Post!
6-13-22
It's official!
I am proud to say that I can officially post my first blog post on my website! I have made a lot of progress since I began working on this website almost a month ago. As of now, I can have a proper conversation with someone about HTML and CSS and I would know what they are talking about. The main reason why I wanted to make this website was so that I could be experienced in web development. Web development always seemed like a skill that everyone expects you to know, and yet I've never had any course in my major cover any of it.The first spark
I took an introductory networking class, but as I have came to learn, the class was more so about the lower level functionality of networks, such as how packets of information transfer, how web URL GET requests work, and network packet transfer failure. I definitely do not regret taking the class, but it was not quite what I was looking for in my education. I wanted to learn how to establish servers and how to set up database connections. There was one assignment where I had to make an HTTP server that sends information over a TCP socket. The program was written in Python 3, and it did not take that long to write. Looking back, it was a fairly easy assignment. I believe that this assignment was the reason why my interest grew in this website. I actually made a portfolio website for my senior project in high school (using wix.comin an editor, no code was written), and I had an idea of some items I wanted to include in a portfolio website.The beginning
After the end of my junior year in college (around May 16th), I began working on the website. I first researched how web servers are made. I came to the decision to use Node.js as my framework for the web server. Since my website is static my friends recommended to use other frameworks like Gatsby or React. Node is intended for dynamic websites, but there's no reason why it can't be used for a static website. I decided to keep using Node since I was not familiar with any framework, and I didn't really feel that it mattered which one I used since I'm a beginner. Eventually, I learned that I also needed to use Express.js, which is built on top of Node. In short, Express back-end apps are much cleaner and simpler to implement than Node apps. Currently, I still host the server from localhost, meaning I am the only one that can access the website while the server is up. I have yet to find a domain name, or a platform that will host the website. I am not familiar with that process, and I don't intend to publicly launch the website until I am satisfied with the HTML pages. I would like to host the web server from my own scrap computer, however I have yet to decide.These are screenshots of the website as it looks now, I think it would be fun to capture this now so that I can compare the look of the website later on.
Home
Blog - I'm pretty proud of this one:
Game:
Contact:
404 Error:
What's pretty neat is that it even looks good in the dark mode web extension that I use,Darkreader.org
Wrap-up
I am very happy with the progress that I made, and I am excited to keep working on the website! This is the end of this post for now, but I plan on writing down more to document my process. There is a very strong chance that I will forget to write more blog posts, but I will try my best. Thank you for taking the time to read this post!-Griffen