“All software developers should have their own blogs, regardless of how much experience they have. We should all share our experiences and findings and help to create a great community of professionals.”

– Sandro Mancuso in “The Software Craftsman”

Please forgive me starting this post with a quote. I usually hate this pretentious move, but it really surprised me, when I read the book. In my opinion, blogs were always something for people with exceptional expertise. The idea that everyone should write a blog, at least for themselves, initially caught me off guard. However, over the years, the idea has stuck with me, and that’s why I’m excited to document my hopefully long journey here.

I had some reservations since I had never hosted a website before and had no idea about the details. Fortunately, thanks to a friend, I found a very straightforward solution that I also use for this blog: Github Pages + Jekyll.

I probably don’t have to tell any developers about GitHub anymore. But the concept of pages was new to me. You create a simple repository with the name $USERNAME.github.io and GitHub hosts it as a public website at https://$USERNAME.github.io (replace $USERNAME with your own GitHub username). With this, the hosting is already done. Free of charge. What more could you want?

Yeah, that’s right: a custom domain, so that you can pretend professionalism to dorks like me. But again, GitHub Pages is the simple solution. You buy a cheap domain and can use it to display the GitHub Pages content. All that is needed is to enter the custom domain in the repository under Settings -> Pages -> Custom domain:

At the DNS provider you only have to create a CMAKE entry that points www.sweetgeorgie.eu to $USERNAME.github.io -> done.

Now you have to wait for the DNA propagation, which can usually take 30 min to 1 day. I stupidly did not do this and therefore still had a wrong IP in the DNS cache, which made me think for a day that it had not worked. What helps is to use a DNS checker. I used whatsmydns for this. This shows how far certain DNS changes of a domain are already propagated.

If you want to have an apex domain as a custom domain, you have to make a few more settings in the DNS provider and have them propagated as well. According to my non-expert understanding, apex domain means that you can leave out the “www” at the beginning of the URL and still get the correct page.

My final settings look like this:

Since I got the domain as cheap as possible, there was no email address included initially. However, I could deliver this quite stress-free via Zoho Mail. All you need is your own domain and a few more settings in the DNS provider.

So this blog is good to go and all that is missing now is content : )