Why have I made a website? I have in fact hosted some website or another at this address for some time. It all started when the UK went into lockdown because of Covid19. With huge amounts of time on my hands and a chromebook that didn’t really run any games, I started learning to code. I stumbled apon The Odin Project and worked through the foundations course. By the way this is a great source of information (and I still follow their instructions whenever I set up git on a new machine).
I was itching to try out my new skills and decided I was going to make a website. So I wrote a very over-complicated mess of html, css and javascript that I thought looked good. I had just one problem: I didn’t have a server to host it on. I was hoping to use a small, cheap rasberry pi but with the pandemic chip shortage they were nearly impossible to buy.
Around the same time I was getting involved in (read: just looking at) linux and FOSS groups. This eventually lead me to finding iSH, a project for running linux (specifically Alpine linux) on an iPhone app. At the time I don’t think I realised how impressive this and I would like to thank tbot, the main contributor for working so much on this.
I used iSH to run my first ever website from my old iPhone5S using static files and the lighttpd web server. As time went by I purchased a rasberry pi 1A+ and moved my website to that. I added PHP to make a message board thing - that code was the worst mess ever! I rewrote it completely in Golang and finally, a couple of weeks ago ripped it all down and restarted as a staticly generated website and blog using Jekyll. I will probably add some back-end functionality at some point but I don’t know what language I’ll be using.
I wonder if anyone else will ever read this. I don’t have any stats for the website right now so I wouldn’t even know if they did. If you are reading this feel free to email me at tomjbrandis@gmail.com, I’d be interested to know.