After some pondering and reading about the IndieWeb I felt it was the right time for me to join what used to be my home for a long time. I grew up with MSN Explorer and one of the coolest things you could do there was join an MSN Group. It were the websites built like the nineties, full on HTML with just a lot of gifs, emoticons, walls of text and a forum. The time I have spent there must have been half my childhood honestly.
That and webchats, at a young age I already became a webtinkerer or the so‑called self‑pronounced webmaster. 🙂
I am diverting now, so after all the pondering I started this weekend project. First I wanted to use a static site generator, I wasn’t that familiar with them and have most of the time used WordPress since it has proven me many times to be stable and therefore reliable. I didn’t wanted to tinker too long for a blog, so I got to work.
Next was the decision of making a theme myself or buying one. Since IndieWeb is all about the selfmaking I have burned my hands and vibe coded this theme, sorry and kind of not sorry, the first output just was immediately something I would have made on my own. I have a degree in programming so it is definitely not that I couldn’t have made it myself, it just happened to work out really great, and I wanted to learn more about integrating a theme into WordPress.
So I got my fingers cracking and went to business, and now you are visiting the end result. I will write the content myself and only use AI for proofreading as I want to deliver something without a million spelling mistakes. There’s my AI disclaimer, from now on I will improve and built stuff myself for the sake of weekend projects and having fun debugging until 2AM.
Going live
The going live part was an interesting experience and something I want to share just a small bit about; I wanted to try out a new hostingprovider since Reddit was flooded with good sayings about it, so here I went to Hetzner. To order I immediately had to create an account before even seeing the full price of what I wanted to order, weird but okay. Made the account, put in my order, the cheapest option seemed okay for my purpose, filled in a domainname iamfox.eu (you couldn’t search in the dropdown, bad UX!) and placed the order.
I thought everything went fine, and things were rolling in the background, as DNS can take a long time 24–48 hours even but normally about an hour or two. So I patiently waited for my domain to come online to get WordPress installed and upload my freshly baked theme. And here’s what should have been straightforward, nothing happened. I went into their panel and thought maybe some DNS record needs to point to the hosting, nope… turns out you have to go to a different panel for that and that one looks completely different, bad UX once again.
Troubleshooting a bit further down the rabbit hole, and here I found out they didn’t registered my domain and it was still up for the grabbing. I must also say their panels were slow to navigate and confusing even for someone who has been around a long time! And that’s when I ran away and went to OVH, I have all my domains there and their panels make sense to me.
What will be next
As iamfox.blog is now live, I will work on writing blog posts when it suits me. I made this space not for the likes or hits. Just to share my unfiltered thoughts, findings, troubles, and my experiences in this strange world we call earth. You will notice a lot of fox themed stuff as I just love them.
The blog is just the beginning as I will use my https://iamfox.space or https://iamfox.eu for even more of my shenenigans, you will find all the real IndieWeb things there like a guestbook, shrines, links, and all else.
Thanks for reading and I want to hear what you think about AI usage for making themes or any webhosting pericles of your own.
Nostalgia hitted me hard here!