Posted 2024-12-26
My own personal website has been something I've vaguely aspired for for quite some time. Carving out a little corner of the internet for hosting my thoughts, creations, and things I generally find interesting has always been something I wanted to do but for one reason or another always ended up being pushed to the side. Over the past week I've finally been able to actually carve out my corner.
I've owned the domain "blakekjohnson.dev" for the past 4 years. Over this period of time it's done a couple of things, but the only thing of note was serving as an alias for Minecraft servers every now and then. Earlier this year I went about setting up my own homelab (which hopefully I'll end up writing about at some point) and in general got really re-invigorated with the idea of personal technical projects.
Shortly after I started experimenting with my own homelab in August I started toying with the idea of my own website again. Since Fall of 2019 I've been particularly taken with Markdown. A formatting language that just makes sense with a focus on the core content was particularly gripping for me. I've experimented with static site generators in the past but hadn't touched any since my love for Markdown started to form. So naturally I started looking at all the different static site generators that are out there before eventually settling on 11ty simply due to stumbling across a website using it in the wild.
Over the course of the past couple of months I had self-hosted the site on my homelab confined to my own personal network - hidden from the outside world. I would write little posts, revise them for weeks at a time every now and then open up a port for a day or so but never share anything. Kind of halfway completing my goal of creating my own personal website.
But then last week something compelled me to make it widely available. Maybe it was the years of telling myself that I wanted to make a website. Maybe it was the fact that I had told other people that I had begun making a blog. Whatever it was I was finally in the right headspace to stop starting and start finishing.
I setup a Cloudflare Pages account, linked my repo, linked my domain and just like that my corner was publicly accessible. Here's hoping I keep it up.
There is no point in talking about making my own website without mentioning some sources of inspiration.