Posted 02/16/26
Creating a website
Hello, this is my first post on this website I created. If you couldn’t
tell, I love the fictional creature meowl. I've always wanted to make a
website but I never wanted to deal with my dad getting mad about self
hosting a website at home. An acquaintance of mine told me Cloudflare
can host it for free so I started looking into it.
I looked at domains and found a meowl.zone domain. I was able to get this domain for cheap on porkbun.com and I bought it same day. I had a pretty good experience with them so far except for the fact that I bought it for $8 and it said the renewal price was $22 a year, but now I look and it is $30 a year. Not absurd but definitely better than GoDaddy not even gonna link them. For hosting I used cloudflare.com which has been very nice as Im using the free static website hosting plan. I watched a few youtube videos and I got cloudflare to connect to my domain and be ready to start the worker to host the site.
Setting up the worker was more tricky as the tutorials I watched used WordPress sites instead of creating an all-new site. I had to figure out how to upload to Cloudflare using Wrangler. It was much easier to create an almost blank template and remove what wasn’t needed.
After I made the first page of my site I started searching how to do all of this with minimal code duplication for the CSS and found out how to share one style sheet for all pages. Minimizing code duplication for HTML I learned isnt great and I'd need to "compile" the HTML from some other language that I did not want to learn. I decided to just make a default layout with a header and footer and hope that CSS classes can pick up most of the formating and to just copy around the HTML and try not to change it.
I looked at domains and found a meowl.zone domain. I was able to get this domain for cheap on porkbun.com and I bought it same day. I had a pretty good experience with them so far except for the fact that I bought it for $8 and it said the renewal price was $22 a year, but now I look and it is $30 a year. Not absurd but definitely better than GoDaddy not even gonna link them. For hosting I used cloudflare.com which has been very nice as Im using the free static website hosting plan. I watched a few youtube videos and I got cloudflare to connect to my domain and be ready to start the worker to host the site.
Setting up the worker was more tricky as the tutorials I watched used WordPress sites instead of creating an all-new site. I had to figure out how to upload to Cloudflare using Wrangler. It was much easier to create an almost blank template and remove what wasn’t needed.
After I made the first page of my site I started searching how to do all of this with minimal code duplication for the CSS and found out how to share one style sheet for all pages. Minimizing code duplication for HTML I learned isnt great and I'd need to "compile" the HTML from some other language that I did not want to learn. I decided to just make a default layout with a header and footer and hope that CSS classes can pick up most of the formating and to just copy around the HTML and try not to change it.