Creation of my site

I kinda wanted to explain some of the hard work I did to make this site, just so I can feel proud of myself.

So how the heck does this work?

I started out trying to make this place a couple months ago, because I wanted to learn about website creation and to have a little online space where I could put stuff that interests me.

I started looking into the options of site hosting, and thought that since I had an old pc lying around, I could self-host my site, which turned out to be pretty cool.

If you don't know much about computers, don't worry, I'll keep it simple.

Usually when people make websites nowadays, they just pay someone else to set it all up for them. Not me. I'm too smart to just give someone my money. I'd rather pour weeks of work into a project to make a somewhat worse version of something than to go out and buy it.

Anyway, all websites are hosted (kept) on things called servers (which are computers that you don't use directly, they don't have screens, you tell them what to do from another computer). These servers are usually kept in some company's facility, but I figured I could make my own server with my great intellect.

I actually used ChatGPT for most of this, don't think that I'm all that smart. But I did learn the whole time, so I know how to do a lot of the stuff, it's not like I was just copy pasting the whole thing.

It took a long time to get all the set-up correct, and I'm still tweaking things all the time, but now it's actually working, which I'm so proud of.

I won't go into too much detail, but you have to access your server remotely (like I mentioned before), so I feel like a super hacker every time I work on the server, with multiple screens just filled with terminals and documentation. hehe

So now that I had my server running, I had to buy a domain. This just means that the people who made the internet own all the website names, and their computers have to figure out how to organize everything, so they want money from me to use their awesome system. So [italosnotes.com] it was. I actually initially created the site in order to share my school notebooks and resources with others, but literally no one thought that was a good idea but me. You can still go there and use the page.

Then I though, hey, why don't i make a place to put my digital creations online? I have a website already, so I made the content subdomain, which you can see at [content.italosnotes.com]. I haven't put much stuff on there, because I've been putting most of my effort into making the site, not the stuff to go onto it...

Finally, I figured I wanted to make my own place to kinda blog, kinda whatever. So now we have the garden. It wasn't as simple as that though. It took me looking at a lot of programs to land on what we're using today, and a lot of trial and error with the help of my best digital friend, ChatGPT. But we pulled through. We ended up using Mediawiki, which is the base program for Wikipedia, which is why they look similar. They just use different skins.

I was trying a bunch of programs before, but I landed on this one cuz

• #1 It works and
• #2 It is similar to [Obsidian] which I use for my personal notes on my pc, it's really great app

Anyway, that's a slightly summarized version of the story, so there you go!