Finishing This Website
Finishing this website
The website was looking really good, however I was not complete. There were still a few things that needed to be done before I could say everything was “finished”. A few things that needed to happen are:
Domain name
Website analytics
Verify the site
Enable Comments
This was not the smoothest sailing, involving several hours of head scratching and repository troubles. But in the end, everything was complete and working properly. Of course I am going to outline how I did everything, and provide links for services that I used.
Domain name
I wondered what to do for my domain name, because I wanted something cleaner than etpreskaz.github.io. I decided that ethankazenske would probably be best. I bought the .com domain, however I quikly realized to manage the domain, there was a monthly subscription. This was not ideal, and I researched alternatives. My website at this time was also experencing issues, which I still do not understand. Luckily those issues have gone away and have not presented themselves again.
I was stumped, so I asked a friend who has done something similar. They told me that NameCheap has a free domain with the Github Student Developer Pack, which can be viewed here. I was luckily already registered, and able to get the domain I wanted. The website was now live at ethankazenske.me.
Google analytics
I decided that Google Analytics was the easiest way to have analytics for my site. However, I thought this would still be very difficult. I was told that this was more complicated than it sounds, and I was wondering how this would go wrong. I worried for nothing though, because Chirpy makes this easy. All I had to do was make the analytics account, and take a code and paste it into the _config.yml file. It worked! I was able to see the activity on my website. It was quite lonely though.
A screenshot of the Google Analytics display
Verifying the site
Having your website be verified is very useful, because not only does it give your website more credibility and authenticity, but it also ranks your website higher on someones search results. Verifying my website was also very easy. All I needed to do was take the code google provided, and have a host record with that code. It was verified! There are many other benefits to having your website verified, and I am excited to experiment with them in the future!
Comments with Giscus
I thought comments would be a cool and interactive way for views to provide feedback to future projects of mine. I also viewed the ideal blog complete only when it has a comment section. After some research, I decided on Giscus, because the comments, rather than being stored on some expenive server, would be stored in a repository on Github. The setup was unclear however, and a friend showed me a post by Yury Zhauniarovich that detailed the setup very well. All I had to do was create a repository, enable discusions, and add a few IDs to the _config.yml file.
Wrapping things up
Making and Finishing the website has been a very interesting experience, and I have learned a lot along the way. This was my first real dive into web development, and it was fasinating. Now I am able to start posting about other projects that I find interesting. I am also hoping that this will not be the end of my journey with web development. But that is for another post! Again, everything for this website is in my Github repository, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below!