Hello World!
This may be just a simple first post on this blog, but you have no idea the frustration and headbanging that led to this post. I've always wanted to have my own website, but just never got around to making one. I finally decided to take the dive and try to build one from scratch with Django, so off to the docs I go. As I read through them, I was thinking "Oh, this shouldn't be so bad, I can probably get this done in a day or two."
Poor, poor, foolish me...
To be fair, actually setting up the backend with Django was a breeze. I had a running, albeit very ugly and basic, website running on my local computer. Then came the CSS...
If I have learned anything from this project, I have learned that I never want to be a web designer All I was doing was trying to bootsrap a free template that I found and I spent so much time pulling my hair out figuring out why it wasn't displaying correctly. This is no doubt due to my lack of experience, but it is experience that I am fine not having. After that was finally finished, we then had to worry about where I would host this site.
Again, because I wanted to learn (and maybe because I hate myself) I decided to host it on a DigitalOcean Droplet. After getting it spun up, I went through the arduous task of moving my whole project to the box, configuring nginx, gunicorn, and making sure all the configuration files were updated properly. This is where 90% of the time spent on this project probably went. I had so, so, so many issues that completely stumped me for hours. Every change in my code was followed by a comment praying to the machine spirits. But in the end, I learned a lot and finally got it working, and now you're looking at it. I have plans for some projects in the future that I think are pretty cool so stay tuned!