Why make a website?
I've got quite a rocky relationship with information.
The way the internet is structured makes it very easy for an individual to broadcast their voice to others. Most people use social media for this type of thing, but most of my favorite places to read about what people are up to are blogs. The straightforward, yet flexible structure of a blog post seems to be to be the most clear and easy way to express ideas over the internet. Though videos and podcasts are also a great way to convey information, they take much more time and energy to produce than a blog post.
How make a website?
Make a text file, put whatever words you want in it ("Hello World!" are
some popular first words), and put .html at the end of the filename.
Congratulations! You've made a website!
Of course, this lacks many of the features widely considered important for most websites, such as being connected to the world via the internet. But one of the things that I remind myself whenever working with websites is that, like many other forms of art, you can put exactly as much into the medium as you want, even if that amount is practically nothing.
The first iteration of this website was made using Jekyll, a static website generator. I basically pick a theme, write some markdown files, and boom, website. I had some issues getting the GitLab pages pipeline to work properly, and some redirection authentication shenanigans, but overall, this has been a much smoother and simpler process. I like this a little more because it lets me focus on the actual content of the site rather than the minute details of how everything is going to look. Going forward, I'm definitely going to write my own Jekyll theme, once I figure out how.
Zola
Just kidding, dont use Jekyll. It's very cryptic and confusing compared to Zola.