Every year you make a list of resolutions for the next. The resolutions are followed enthusiastically for initial few days or month based on your perseverance. For most of the people like us, all the resolutions vanish into thin air by the end of the first or second month of the new year. Making a personal website was top on my list for 2019 goals again (Phew.. ;) ). Unlike my previous attempts to have every resource in place before starting the website development, this time I was absolutely clear about starting it small with a shoestring budget and clear timelines.

It took me a half a day and did not cost anything except for 1250 INR for domain registration to complete this goal. This blog is about sharing my experiences on the different hosting tools, design guideline and content for the website.

Hosting Needs…

The different tools that I explored for hosting the personal website were Wordpress and Wix. The ease of building a website, available plugins for backup, security, integration with other services and the number of templates available on these platforms simply overwhelm you. These platforms also require you to either transfer your domain ownership or move to Premium Plan for using domain mapping service. Being familiar with Github, it was easy to zero in GithubPages that allows hosting websites directly from the Github repository. It also allowed mapping a custom domain for a Github Pages website.  Now, it was only a matter of choosing the right template.

Designing Needs…

For the website, I needed a free Bootstrap 4.0 template, a logo, few images. For the landing or home page, WoodRox from ColorLob fulfilled my need for a responsive multi-purpose bootstrap template with a big banner image, product features,  and a good blogging template.

To add an artistic touch, the two (2) images were processed using GoART achieved using Indian & Pointillism AI photo effects. Somewhere deep down, the superhero portrait artist is still alive in me and hope to present it on the website someday.

Content Needs…

I wish to see this website to represent my professional and personal interests. LinkedIn provides a good platform to mention and share your project contributions and experiences. However, that is still at a professional level and does not reflect accurately the character of the team during the good or bad times of a project. I will try to reflect that in the projects mentioned.

For quite some time, I have been bookmarking tweets that are of particular interest to revisit at my leisure. However while reading, I also do not like the experience of looking at the smaller device. To improve that I started exploring the Twitter Account Activity APIs so that it can be included in the website. The sad part of my research and little hands on (more on this later..) is that Bookmarks events are still not available. At last, I used a much simpler approach to embed my Tweets using Twitter Publish. It also avoids the cost associated with hosting an app for reading bookmarked tweets.

Here is the list of services used for free…

• Github - Your code repository
• Fotor - For Digital Art
• Hatchful - For Logo creation
• Colorlib - For amazing WoodRox Template
• Unsplash - For beautiful, free and amazing photos
• CloudCannon - For hosting Jekyll Blog Site

Still, need to add more sections but nothing gives more satisfaction than marking a task complete of your checklist before the start of the year.