Inspiration
I am sure you think of the other practical applications of the knowledge you gained at work or at leisure.
- If you are a content writer at work, you might be inspired to write a book or articles or maintain a personal blog.
- If you are a chartered accountant, you might want to track your expenditure, analyse the data you collected and, well, make wiser spendings.
- And, if you have dealt with web technologies for software development, like me, you want to build and maintain a website.
Over the course of my software engineering experience I have come across everything I need to build a website. I might not have actually gone into gaining a detailed knowledge of configuring and extending of all of them, but I have experimented with so many of them, that find it naturally compelling to find some recreational ways of using them.
So what are the tools I used to build my website? I hope this blog post inspires you to explore similar creative ideas using these tools.
Tools Used
DIY Manual (Outline; Details in the links above)
- Buy a domain at domains.google.com
- Create a docker image which runs the web server
- PHP > 5.5
- Git
- Install Grav-CMS. Useful grav plugins are:
- admin console plugin
- git-sync
- Install google-cloud’s Stackdriver logging agent
- Create a compute engine VM
- Deploy the docker image on the created VM
- Allocate a static IP address to the VM and add appropriate DNS entries
- Use Google Domain’s DNS Records entry page, or…
- Set up a DNS Server at Google Cloud (which I did)
- Add Content ! Write a blog post!
Alternatives
This article outlines a hands-on process of creation of the website. There are other methods like maintaining a Wordpress blog and linking it with a custom domain. But then, unless you go premium you need to show a few google ads.