- Published on
Creation of my website and blog
- Authors
- Name
- Wout Van Brussel
- @VanBrusselWout
My website and blog are split into two parts: my personal portfolio/website, which I developed entirely from the ground up, and a blog site based on a template I found online and customized to fit my needs.
Development Process
My portfolio is built using plain HTML, SCSS, and a bit of JavaScript. It has been a long-term project that I have been working on for many years and will continue to develop over the coming months and years. I started by creating a few wireframes. Once I finalized a design, I paused work on it for a few months. When I resumed, progress was slow due to schoolwork, with about 25 minutes of development each day. Eventually, I took another break but then suddenly felt the urge to complete it and finished it in about three days.
Hosting
For hosting, I purchased my domain, "woutvanbrussel.be," a year ago on Vimexx and used it for other projects. For the hosting itself, I use a VPS from Oracle Cloud’s free tier, which provides 4 vCores, 24GB RAM, and 200GB storage. You can configure this as one big VPS or four evenly shared ones. I had already set up one VPS for our Super Tux Kart server and created another for my website project, allocating 1 core, 6GB RAM, and 75GB storage. To manage my website project, I installed AApanel on the VPS, which handles most of the work, including SSL certification. I created a new website on it, and since then, my portfolio has been hosted there.
Blog Site
My blog site, in contrast, is more pre-made. I use Vercel for hosting and managing the site. I started with a template provided by Vercel, which set up everything for me, including creating a GitHub repository for easy editing and automatic deployment. The only customization required was adding a new domain, "blog.woutvanbrussel.be." The template I use is the "Tailwind Nextjs Theme," which I tweaked to better fit my needs. While this template works fine for now, I plan to integrate the blog into a complete website I will develop in the future.
Conclusion
Overall, creating and hosting my own website has been a very rewarding experience. I have learned a lot from it and will continue to grow my skills as I further develop both my portfolio and blog.