Having managed to successfully upload a new, albeit simple, home page for my freshly purchased website, I decided it was time to aim a little higher, and get a real site published. My initial thought was that I would throw something together in Django, not because it was the fastest path to putting up a site, but just to continue working with the platform. Frankly, publishing a blog / mostly static site is a much easier task than the NPC generator, and it would be nice to have something I can display publicly to support my claims.
Sadly, this was not to be. Long story short, Namecheap does not have Django installed on their shared hosting servers. My options were to either move to a more expensive plan (I’d rather not right now) or to follow the instructions posted here to install it myself using virtualenv. I was tempted, but for the fact that Namecheap doesn’t make any promises about it working, and it was starting to look like I might be wading into a quagmire.
Instead, I chose to go with the practical decision, and Michael’s advice, and just install WordPress. The goal, after all, is to put up a personal website as a combination resume & place to write my thoughts. It turns out just shrugging and installing WordPress is stupidly easy. Using the control panel supplied by Namecheap it was just a matter of changing the PHP version to 7.0 (again, Michael’s advice) and then installing the latest version of WordPress, again through the control panel. All told it probably took me like five minutes. You could probably do it faster if you didn’t bother to read anything.
Once WordPress was deployed, I started poking around. Say this for WordPress, you can figure out most of the basic stuff just by clicking around and paying attention. It wasn’t long before I had figured out how to add / remove pages, edit content and post blog entries. I havne’t tried doing anything to the overall style of the site yet, but I did purge the images of food (lest someone mistake me for a hipster) and replace them with pictures of our dog and digital sweet nothings for the GF. Again, a man takes his brownie points where he can get them. And who wouldn’t want to see huge pictures of our beagle? Put your hand down.
All told, getting all this up and running was pretty easy and fun. The same goes for setting up my email accounts (except it was especially fun). The last outstanding thing I need to take care of are my site certificates, and I should probably switch to https. I keep getting complaints that the certificates are invalid, so I need to look into setting all of that up. I’m hoping there’s just a configuration option or something I need to turn on with Namecheap.
Once that’s solved, it’s a matter of designing the site to serve its purpose (though I’m tempted to squirrel the current version away somewhere for posterity’s sake). Then I can start linking to it and spamming it around. Fun!
Lastly, a word about the Python / Django project. I’m still working on it, rest assured. It’s currently in a phase where I’m doing a lot of work setting up the database. This is mostly just data entry. So far as I know, there isn’t any good digital copy of all the bits and pieces that I can parse through to sift out what I need. Boy don’t I wish there was. Granted, the d20PFSRD is (or was?) a thing, but it feels dirty to do something like lift their database for my own use. I guess I could ask if they’d mind, but at this point, I’m so far into doing the way I have been, I may as well finish (textbook sunk cost fallacy!).
At any rate, I’m getting to the point where I can shift from the DB to developing the API for the front end to call into and the site can start producing actual effects that would make it worth publishing. I think I’m going to curtail some of my original targets for the sake of getting a prototype out there sooner, and I’ll talk about that some at a later point. Basically, there should be something coming…soon.