Website Forever Under Construction

I always wanted to build a website of my own. For reasons which are primarily my mistakes I never got around to doing it. I wanted to build everything from scratch and make it perfect and that is where I went wrong. I have now understood that the perfect thing does not exist in reality. It only exists in my head. The correct way to build a website is to start with a bare minimal version and keep on making changes. After a few iterations on the website, the original website would be almost indistinguishable from the current version of the website. It might not be perfect but it would certainly be improved in some sense. Everything that needs to be built cannot be known in the first version of a website. I already have the perfect website on my head, thanks to my procrastination, so I decided to just start making a not so perfect website which exists in reality.

Changelog

Day 1: March 26, 2024

I have just started work on building my website. Work is steadily progressing on building the backend server and configuring services that will host the website.The following has been done so far.

  1. VM & OS Configuration
  2. Apache2 Web Server Configuration
  3. PHP-FPM Configuration
  4. Firewall & SSL Certificate Configuration
  5. MariaDB Database Server Config

Day 2: March 27, 2024

Something exciting happened today. I wanted to do this for a long time but never got around to doing it. Deploying my website to my server with a single command. In this case well 2 commands git push.

  1. Setup a GitHub Private Repo which hosts the code to my personal website. Setup 2 branches a main branch and a develop branch. The idea was to have code from the main branch be deployed to the production version of the website @ sainikbiswas.com and the code from the develop branch be deployed to the development version of the website @ dev.sainikbiswas.com
  2. The first part was done today. Code from the main branch now deploys to the production website @ sainikbiswas.com

Day 3: March 28, 2024

  1. Documented the deployment of the main branch to the production website and cleaned up the code a little wherever possible.
  2. Setup the development website dev.sainikbiswas.com
  3. The second part was done today. Code from the develop branch now deploys to the development website @ dev.sainikbiswas.com
  4. I started working and committing all changes in the main branch. After setting up the dev site today I realized I should have done it the other way. Setup the dev site first followed by the production. So I merged all changes from the main branch back into the develop branch. Every thing now seems to be in correct order.
  5. Configured Uptime Monitoring for the website in case there are any issues or outages.