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Shipped, personal website is live now ! :)

By mridubhatnagar ・5 comments

Hey folks,
I am glad to launch my personal website - https://www.mridubhatnagar.in

Having a personal corner on the web in the form of a website has been a long-pending task. I was confused with the following things:
1. What platform to choose Jekyll, Pelican, Hugo, Ghost, etc.
2. Domain, do I need a custom domain? Or netlify, Heroku domain would do.
3. Do I actually need a personal website or I should write on already available platforms like dev.to, medium, etc?
4. Theme for the website?
5. Should I build a platform from scratch?

All of these questions led to a lot of decision paralysis which eventually resulted in procrastination.

I am glad to share finally the website is up and running. Soon I would be writing my first blog post on the platform.

Thank you to everyone from the community who shared their experiences, answered the question that I asked.

Looking forward to your feedback. I plan to iteratively improve the website.

Your comment

rita_romenkova

Hey Mridu How cool to find a person who does the same thing at the same time as me! I've recently launched my blog too - https://romenkova.com/ and I've gone the same questions as you did. So maybe it would be interesting for you to have my answers.

  1. What platform to choose Jekyll, Pelican, Hugo, Ghost, etc. I personally decided to make it as simple as possible and just do it with familiar tools. I'm a Front End dev, so I've chosen Gatsby because I know React. Cool thing, everything works out of the box - just install and you're ready to go.
  2. Domain, do I need a custom domain? Or netlify, Heroku domain would do. The custom domain looks more professional, but if the content is interesting - who cares? By the way, I wound out that sometimes it is useful to google for promo codes. In the first place, my domain cost was around 8$, I googled "promo code " and eventually it became 1$ after using it.
  3. Do I actually need a personal website or I should write on already available platforms like dev.to, medium, etc? After reading the newsletter from Monica Lent (bloggingfordevs.com, inspiring and extremely useful stuff), I decided to go with the personal website. I just wanted my own part of the internet: customizable, independent. But I see one an obvious problem - no one sees my article (I guess it's also because I've just started and have only one). I had a testing article on Medium about Next.js and it had some amount of views, but in the case of a personal website - it's zero views.
  4. Theme for the website? I've made my own because I like to design interfaces.

I have some feedback Looks great! It's so amazing and impressive that you have lots of talks at conferences! The Facebook link at the header leads to the Ghost page, which must be a bug. The email link at the contacts page goes to 404. You could make it "mailto:[email protected]" and it will open email client when clicking. Same with blog link from the contacts page - 404.

Good luck with your blog! Let's grow together.

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mridubhatnagar

Hey Rita

Thank you for writing the answers and for having a look at the website.

In my case, the limitation was that I am neither into the design and nor into front-end development. I ideally thought of building everything from scratch but because of this had to let go of the idea.

Some years back I used to write on medium, then for a while started writing on dev.to. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out the solution. Also, I wasn't very comfortable sharing personal stories on any third party platform. Hence, wanted a personal space.

Another limitation with the existing platforms was that it felt more like only writing. I mean I could not use my developer skills anywhere. So, I was also looking for a solution where everything is not readymade. I wanted to do a bit off DIY stuff. And, my current solution allowed me to do that.

I am still apprehensive about how the costs would be once the content grows. But, I think that is not an immediate concern as of now.

Yes, views are definitely a trade-off when it comes to personal platform. I am hoping to build an audience. Though it is going to take its due course of time.

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bhumi1102

Congratulations on getting your website ready!

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