Hellou! In this article I will describe how this blog was created, everything I had to do, my thoughts, etc. Even to give motivation to those who have had this idea for a while but haven’t implemented it due to lack of knowledge or something else. This entire experience was my first, so I learned a lot along the way, many things I knew in theory but had never done in practice, I took this blog mainly as a great learning experience and a personal lab.

Domain

First I started by buying the domain I wanted, I always had the nickname Diegovsk, so I thought it would be cool to put a .sk domain and combine it with my nickname. It was a long search until I got it, the domain belongs to Slovenia, I tried to buy the domain on several of their websites, I spent a lot of time until I was able to find a website that I could buy it from, from then on it just went more smoothly.

DNS and security

I already wanted to prepare this part in advance, researching open source WAFs, etc., but I decided to stick with Cloudflare for learning purposes and it apparently has an ok service even on the free plan, anti DDoS, DNS, among other services. 🛡️

Hosting

I have an old notebook that I hardly use, I installed Proxmox on it and I’m hosting it on an Ubuntu Server. I had to put my network knowledge into practice here, to configure everything and make it look nice. I spent a long time racking my brain to free up the ports and perform the redirection, but after long hours of trying to do so without success, I concluded that it could only be something with the ISP. After contacting my ISP, I discovered that they do not release ports for dynamic IP addresses, I needed to buy a physical address, which is very expensive and not worth it for my use, I had already configured DDNS on Cloudflare using ddclient haha, but ok, it happens. Looking for alternative ways to serve my website locally, I saw that one of the options was to use a tunneling service, like ngrok, and luckily Cloudflare also had this type of service, so I chose to use it, and all for free 🆓 ( It almost seems like I’m advertising to them).

Web Server

At that moment I did some research to make this decision, I ended up choosing NginX, it ends up being lighter and faster than Apache, that was my conclusion after my research. So I learned the basics to make everything functional, which is basically configuring sites-enabled and sites-available.

HANDS ON THE CODE!! (or not)

The Hugo framework is so simple and practical that I didn’t even write a single piece of code in Go, basically just install a template and use it (because it’s a static website). At this stage I had a lot of silly and small problems, which took a long time to resolve, but in the end everything worked out. The learning curve is very quick and made it a lot easier.

So all I had to do was put everything together and voila, it was ready.

Disclaimers

This entire process took about 2 weeks, or in hours, about 30 hours, and I spent a lot of time to purchase the domain and configure the local network/server, especially as I depended on my ISP for some steps. The order I did things probably wouldn’t be ideal, but it worked. I’m omitting a lot of errors that happened, this whole process was a lot of troubleshooting.

As the first article on my blog, I will give a brief summary of what my space will be, and what we will see here. I started with the intention of learning Go, I didn’t see about the Hugo framework, or which blog was written on it. To my surprise, I didn’t write any Go code hahaha, but at least Hugo is very simple and with the templates it’s very easy to create a website.