As a person who use internet in daily basis, I think something
personal like a domain name is essential to have. But, there is no good
personal domain name available for free. Fortunately, the price to “borrow” a
domain name from the registrar is fairly affordable. So, without even thinking
more about price to pay, I decided that what I invested in this thing will
someday get useful for everyone, in anyway.
After I “reserved” one domain name, I need to associate it with other service.
The two things that important to be setting up immediately are blog and email.
Blog is like my “broadcasting center”. I store my notes, my journals there.
Everyone is welcome to visit there, and I hope it can help someone to answer
their question someday. Email become my virtual identity. I use it to register
to many service on the internet. Especially with my own custom domain name,
I can make my blog and email look more personally.
Here I explain how I build my blog step by step.
Domain Name
I register my domain from a web hosting provider. I just pay for the domain
name, not the hosting service.
About what provider I currently use, it can be found using a domain tool easily.
Blog
In order to build my infrastructure, I need to have a server, dedicated internet
or static IP address to run the software up. But I don’t have any of them, so I
just use free service from external providers. There is a lot of providers who
can give us some space to host our web and email.
In early time I touch with internet, I did use some blogging framework to run my
blog. I ever use Blogger, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. I spend a long time with
Wordpress. But, due to personal favor, finally I switch to Octopress.
Why Octopress? Because that is simple. It has beautiful design, while easy to use. I can create post directly from Vim on my Linux console. It can be updated using git, so I can feel the sysadmin way to write a post. It use a simplify html-like syntax, markdown. I can host my blog together with my application repository in Github. You can check this article for more details. With this Octopress take control my way to blog, I can focus on contents that I want to share rather than have to be confused to setup and design my blog.
SSL
For security purpose, I use free ssl service from CloudFlare. The setup process is fairly easy. The requirements for its service is just a domain name with top level domain. I just need to set my DNS configuration to point CloudFlare DNS. Additionally, there is a feature so I can force my blog visitor to use https in order to see the ssl sign.
Rather than using well-known free email service, I need to host my own email because I want to use my own domain name. Fortunately, there is email provider that provide free email service using custom domain, thanks to Zoho Mail. Even with free service, I can use my own domain name.
That’s all about my blog. I hope it all will be useful. Thanks for reading.