Making My Personal Site My Own

I've been a blogger for most of my life - but now I really want to start making my personal site my own.

History of my blogs

WordPress

I've been a WordPress user practically since I could think coherently. I believe that I started my first personal blog in early 2009 at 8 years old.

What thoughts worth reading would an eight year old have?

I first started writing tutorials for the game I was obsessed with at the time, Poptropica, a kid-friendly flash game with a virtual world. I eventually got added to a community blog of other kids who just enjoyed virtually hanging out. We wrote collaborative fan fiction and argued like a bunch of children wasting time. I look back at this time fondly, but the stuff I wrote makes modern me cringe.

In my tweenage and teenage years, I redid my personal site as a spiritual prayer journal. The religious community I was a part of at the time was big into "being all-in" - all of your life is all about God - so I thought my internet presence should be too. As I've deconstructed, I can look back at the very earnest blog posts, like the one where I declared I would give up video games because they didn't further my relationship with God, and see that I was a misguided but passionate kid.

In college, after I discovered my self-hosting passion, I spun up a WordPress docker container and wrote a few blog posts about my process setting up my home server.

After college, when I started my career in IT and started to learn software development, the idea of having a website that really was my own began to be more appealing. On the other hand, after spending my workdays tinkering with computers, doing more of the same at home lost its appeal.

I switched from WordPress to Mkdocs Material for ease of maintenance and to match the documentation I was doing at work. This also meant I could write my personal blog posts in my favorite text editor, Obsidian. If you're reading this blogpost recently after it came out, you're likely reading it from the Mkdocs version of the blog. However, this was still hosted in my living room. As I continue to grow in my web development journey, I want to utilize modern cloud technology to deploy my sites — enter Cloudflare Pages.

Cloudflare Pages

I've been looking into Cloudflare Pages for a while now, and it seems like an interesting product. This would require I look outside my comfortable self-hosted bubble but would also stretch my skills in a good way. I don't want to limit myself by refusing to utilize cloud-based technology because of my passion for self-hosting.

Cloudflare Pages is a (FREE!) web hosting platform with unlimited bandwidth for static sites. They even have a template for Mkdocs that makes it relatively easy to switch to. All I need to do is connect Cloudflare to the Git repo I have for my site, and they handle the rest.

GitHub will automatically trigger a build for my blog for the non-prod branches, protecting it behind Cloudflare access. For the production branch of my blog's Git Repo, it will push it to the world.

Since I already configured my DNS for domains to be through Cloudflare, all I needed to do was adjust the CNAME record from my self-hosted server to the new site, and I was off to the races. If you're reading this post, it's coming from Cloudflare pages instead of the server in my living room.

For the record, I have no affiliation with Cloudflare; they just provide free DNS and hosting with very user friendly documentation.

What's Next

Soon(TM) I plan on coding my own Next.JS based static site that talks to a Wagtail based headless CMS on build. This is going to be my most complex personal project yet - I will be writing the front-end JavaScript, the backend Python code, and trying to make it look decent as well. I want to challenge myself to make something that is maintainable, expandable, and looks sleek. I'm genuinely excited for this project, but I know it's going to stretch my development skills.

I will likely deploy it using Cloudflare pages. I plan on documenting this process on this site - feel free to reach out if you want to chat about it.