Making of :bloogeR is mE
June 15, 2021, 2:41 p.m.Abstract
:bloogeR is mE was inspired by Ben's amazing blog at 16BPP.net and took exactly seven full work-days to complete. This project is created with Django and served with Gunicorn and Nginx.
The process of making the blog was greatly facilitated with the help of many tutorials along the way, which I will link in the related sections below.
Django
Django renders the webpages and manages the database, which contains information about each post. It is fairly similar in structure to the polls app created in the official Django 3.2 tutorial.
Web server
Gunicorn and Nginx are responsible for serving the web pages. Gunicorn is a Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) that interfaces between web apps (Django in this case) and web servers (Nginx in this case).
How to set both of these up along with Django can be found in this amazing Digital Ocean tutorial.
Domain certification
I bought this domain off of namecheap.com for about $3 for the first year, but it costs about $20 for every year after... so we will see if I will keep this domain or not.
I certified the web server using Certbot (instructions can be found at the bottom of the tutorial linked above), but I encountered a problem when configuring my domain's DNS: The domain was seemingly unavailable even though my web server was running perfectly fine.
To fix this problem, make sure you have two "A" records added in your domain's DNS settings:
- An "A" record with the host as "@" without the quotes
- and an "A" record with the host as just "www" without the quotes.
Make sure the IP address in both records is the external (WAN) IP address of your web server.
CSS
I had originally used Bootstrap for this project, as it was easy to use and was what I had used for a prior project.
However, I talked with a friend about it and realized BS was very bulky for the client, slowing down load times, and in the end, I didn't actually really like the templates I was trying out.
So ultimately, I bunkered down, scrapped two full days of work, and spent the next two days making my own CSS stylesheet, heavily inspired by the high-contrast format of this graphics research paper.
The final result, in my opinion, is very nice, and I am very pleased with it.