Basic Website Resources
On this page you will find links to resources. It is not a full course, but rather a compilation of resources and concepts.
We will go throughout these topics:
Code
We will focus on simple static website.
Static site generator
Here is the 2 mains static site generator software:
Both software options support these languages:
Although, if it exist other supported formats for configuration, like TOML, very close from the INI file syntax used for many Windows applications and games, I would recommend YAML as it is used to configure metadata for Markdown pages (title, date, …).
Jekyll
It is the most popular static site generator. It was created by the founder of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner, thus it is the build engine by default for GitHub Pages.
To be short, it is meant to stable and easy to use for website beginners.
Hugo
Personally, I am more familiar with Hugo.
It is a more recent project (2008 for Jekyll, 2013 for Hugo), with more modern syntax.
To be short, it is meant to fast and more advanced users, but still easy compare to actual web development.
Hosting
Web hosting is one the main Internet hosting service that is used today.
Having website imply managing those aspects, which you pay for:
The server is the machine that host the content and other things for the website.
As for the domain name, it is the part that identify and secure where to look on the Internet.
For example, https://neocities.org/browse is a URL, where neocities.org is the domain name.
Those 2 can be “rented”. Although, web hosting service provider can help to provide all those simply.
Web hosting service
There is many to choose from, you can even make your own, but we will focus on those 2 for this article:
- GitHub Pages (domain names start with
github.io) - Neocities (domain names start with
neocities.org)
Both offer a free tier option for server and domain name.
GitHub Pages
It is the GitHub service for hosting website. As mentioned, it used Jekyll by default.
For people that familiar with development, but do not want to manage everything, they used it for basic presentation.
Even if the GitHub host several major open source projects, GitHub itself is not open source.
Neocities
It was created in 2013 to “revive the support of free web hosting of the now-defunct GeoCities” (https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2013/05/28/making-the-web-fun-again).
It is open source (FreeBSD) and you can discover other websites:
It is more of a social network of website, rather than simply a web hosting service, so in proportion there is more creative websites.
It is more open to creative people rather than technical ones. Thus, they got resources to help you getting started with your website: