First Steps — March 29, 2024

A registrar, a nameserver, and a webhost walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “You’re always my first customer, Cloudflare.”

Always open with a bad joke.

Welcome to my site! I’m WhyLater, and this is simply a personal website, domain, blog, portfolio, whatever.

I’m in IT, and I’ve been in the Support side of things for a few years now. I’ve dabbled in some projects to try to get my Engineering chops up, but I’ve decided to take things further. So moving forward, I’m going to use this site to do just that; any new project I work on, I will host here, along with blog entries and illustrations to show them off. And the nice thing is, hosting everything on this domain is its own project — or series of projects, really.

In that vein, our first blog will be discussing the site itself. So far, it’s just this one page (or is it??), but getting here actually took me a few hours.

• The first step was buying a domain. After spending some indecisive time picking the TLD before landing on .me (whylater.net does have a nice ring to it though…), I went shopping. At first, I was looking at Namecheap, but decided to do some more research. After finding out that Cloudflare actually sold the domain for cheaper, it was a no-brainer: better price, best performance around, lots of other services, and all without trying to change the price on you or flood you with other offers (#notspon).

• Next was figuring out site hosting. I started by using Google Sites. I spent 30 seconds throwing up an “under construction” page, then published it. Google Sites has you add a TXT entry in your DNS to authorize your domain to access the site, so I added that. I messed around with the CNAME entry to get it to point to the Google Site… and ran into an issue. Apparently, even with Cloudflare’s CNAME flattening (which allows you to link your root domain via CNAME), Google Sites is not capable of being linked via root domain. So, if you typed ‘whylater.me’ into your browser, you would get a 404; you’d have to type ‘www.whylater.me’. Even though there are workarounds using redirection, this was enough of a 20th century point of friction that I decided to move my site hosting (at least for root domain) elsewhere. And what do you know — Cloudflare also has free site hosting when you buy a domain. However, Cloudflare doesn’t have a graphical site builder; you just upload your .html and .css files and publish. So, I made a simple .html doc (it’s been ~20 years so I had ChatGPT help me, don’t judge) that just said, “Under Construction”.

• When you publish through Cloudflare, it gives you a subdomain of their hosting domain to link to. Changing my root CNAME record to point to that page was a simple process… I thought. I couldn’t get it to work at first. Browsing to the site’s actual awkward gibberish URL worked, but going to ‘whylater.me’ gave a Cloudflare ‘site not found’ error page. I researched and troubleshot this for longer than I care to admit. Eventually, I found that you can’t just point the CNAME record at the site; you must also add an entry for the domain to Cloudflare’s webhost, to allow the CNAME to work. It’s the same concept as Google’s TXT record from earlier. Once I spent 30 seconds adding that, boom, it worked. Whylater.me was now live, baby.

• Later, I decided to lookup some pre-baked CSS made by someone much more talented than me, just so my empty page would be empty AND pretty. I found this lovely theme, downloaded the .html and .css files, and put them in a folder. However, when I tested, the CSS didn’t apply. I’m not sure if the author made a mistake, or simply expected the user to know enough basic HTML to link to a stylesheet. Either way, I ended up having to dust off my 20-year-old HTML chops after all, whose last tour of duty was building a Final Fantasy 7 fan site on Angelfire. After getting reacquainted with head, body, and main, with Google’s help and some trial and error, I linked to my CSS stylesheet! Now, I’m writing this blog in a Word document after the fact, and still have to add the text to my page — I’m fully expecting to break the formatting and have to spend another hour on it.

That brings us to now. Since I’m not trying to become a full-blown web dev at the moment, hand-coding HTML is a temporary stopgap. As such, my next steps will be to add a website builder and blog software to my stack, since so much of the site moving forward will rest on those two processes. I’ll probably start a Links page, too, to start linking to my assorted things on the internet (LinkedIn, certifications, etc.)

If you read this, thanks for hanging out. It’s essentially just a journal, but I appreciate anyone who comes on this ride with me. With that, until next time!