I have worked on a lot of personal projects related to the usage of technology. Over the past year, I have completely converted an old laptop and an old desktop into a home server. The amount of time and effort which that took is made very small by the amount of work that has gone into the creation of this personal blog. The first, and most important, tool that I learned to use in the creation of this blog is called Amazon Web Services. It is essentially a suite of hundreds of various cloud-based programs that an individual can use for their business or their personal lives. The two that were important for this adventure were Route 53 and EC2.
The first thing that I did was create an EC2 instance which would host WordPress, the software that I used to design this website. EC2 is a piece of software that runs Ubuntu, which is an operating system that I have some prior experience with. I used this knowledge, as well as some assistance from ChatGPT, to install an Apache web server and put WordPress on that server. This is a process which took some time, and is technically still incomplete at the time of writing. This is because I have yet to certify my site with HTTPS, the protocol that shows you a padlock next to the URL in your web browser. This is because it can often take DNS servers several days to confirm that I am using my domain for the purpose that I claim to be using it for.
Speaking of domains, the next part of learning to use Amazon Web services was learning to use Route 53. This part of AWS allowed me to purchase and manage my domain. When I got my domain, I assigned it to the right spot and got my website up and running. I also used this domain in conjunction with Google Workspace to create a professional email for myself, being mike@misterarndt.com.
Finally, when all was configured and properly running, I had to undertake the process of creating a website design using WordPress: a program that I had not used prior to today in any capacity. After spending a great amount of time fiddling with my website and making sure that everything was in the correct spot and was also functioning, I began to use the website for its intended purpose.
Creating a personal website is a great decision for anyone that is even partially interested in computers or has something important to share with the world. I have used my knowledge of computers to help me stand out from the crowd by having a website that I can call my own.