Before you read too far into this - I’m not an expert at this. I’ve never done it. But around lunch time today I decided to tackle one of my 2026 goals --- create my own website.

I’m now watching the Rams vs the Bears at 7PM, and these changes that I write into VS code and push to main end up on the internet… crazy!

The documented steps below are more so for myself to remember what I did… but if you find this to be helpful then heck yeah, I hope you get some use from this!

Step 1 - Buy a Domain

Seems like there are quite a few places to do this - I used namecheap and it was pretty easy. Search around to see whats available, add what you want to the cart, and then checkout.

BOOM You own a domain. Pretty cool. They have a domain privacy guard for free. No idea how well it works, I work in cybersecurity so I probably should have a better idea of this, but my realm is more on the dev side… Maybe I can add this to my todo list ( # TODO ) - wondering now if I’ll be able to add tags somehow in the actual mark down to someday compile a list of all the things I meant to come back and do?

Step 2 - Host the Domain

Who’s going to actually host the domain? I went with netlify they seemed to have a good reputation - and using their DNS (I had to go into the namecheap custom DNS and add the netlify name servers) it made adding TLS certs for my domain, and am using HTTPS. Cool.

I did a quick whois lookup as well as a urlscan.io scan and I didn’t see my own information on either of those. I’m sure with the right knowledge it’d be pretty easy to get to that, but for my general purpose of having a website to write blog articles the current situation will suffice.

Step 3 - Render something on your domain

Now how are we going to build the site? I’ve messed around with web apps in react before, I’ve wrote some javascript / html / css. I’ve never enjoyed a single minute of any of that. I’m more of a python / markdown kind of guy. Some quick google searches pointed towards Astro. Create a github repo npm install astro and just like that you’ve got a simple web app up and running. The blog posts are just mark down.

Get onto vscode - create a new markdown file with whatever you want in it - push it to main (will need to start making branches and PR’s) and its there.

The last step is to go into netlify and connect it to your github repo. Netlify automatically recongized astro which was cool - it was also pretty darn easy.

Step 4 - Make it better, begin to write!

Now I just need to get rid of all the init junk, and start creating my layout, and organizing the markdown files. Overall not too bad!

Follow On Steps / Lessons Learned

• Make changes in VS Code… deploy the dev server… check changes are what you want and THEN push to main (or realistically push to a branch and make a PR into main… )