#After two months I settled on my first cool url. Then started a journey of over 10 urls which all were very based for the time

[researchgate]

@bakerstreetdoctor First of all how. Secondly, yours is a classic. It's a relic of days long past. but i.love.too.many.men, day.dreaming.with.harry (sans the periods)... These are awful. Makes my blood boil

Sametjmes my notes have the weirdest most awful ever urls like who the hell has a harry styles related url in the year of our lord 2025

[squarecarousel]

Challenge 144: 10 Years, Looking Forward: A-Frame Studio Life Buckle up-- this is a long one! Wow, ten years. It’s hard to believe a whole decade has passed since Square Carousel began, and since I graduated college. In some ways, it feels like another lifetime, and in others, it feels vastly shorter than the decade before that, from ages 12 to 22. Time is fascinating that way. College was such an incredibly impactful time period, but just a measly 4 years-- I could have done college 2.5 more times back-to-back in the years since I graduated, but somehow those four, from 2007-2011 were monumental.  It’s hard to believe I’ll be in a post-college world without Square Carousel, since the group has been a constant in my life these last ten years. I’m really proud that we made it this far and are able to choose to end the journey, rather than it fizzling out or dying from lack of interest. Sometimes it felt like that might happen, but other times it felt like we were blooming. There have been many ups and downs over the course of this journey. And damn, it was a lot of hard to work to keep running, but I am so grateful for the learning experience. I know so much more about leadership now than I ever would have before-- the delicate balance of having rules to keep the group running (deadlines, participation requirements, our dreaded “strike system”) and keeping up morale (knowing when to forgive slip-ups, keeping challenges sufficiently entertaining and well...challenging, making sure the group feels like it’s a community). Elizabeth and I were reluctant leaders, just naturally having to take those roles as other original members of the group left and were replaced by folks who needed guidance. We definitely didn’t seek it out, but we knew that if the group were to stay alive, we had to put some structure into the system. Pretty early on we made our rules and guidelines, extended the challenges to 3 weeks from just 2, and worked on our visual image online. Our awesome logo was made by former member Casey Crisenbery, and we switched from Wordpress to Tumblr, purchasing a URL, and Casey using special code for custom organization on the site. Sketch critiques were now a halfway point through our 3 weeks-long challenge, which helped a lot with the community aspect and engagement. We started doing interviews for each member, reaching out to other illustration groups, blogs and submission sites and had our work featured on a few of them. Some of us even got jobs from the connections made through Square Carousel!  There was a bad stretch several years ago when I wasn’t sure we’d make it through, with toxic behavior and a few folks petitioning for removing deadlines and structure, making everything optional. One thing I can tell you with certainty after ten years of working with artists is that 95% of us require deadlines to do anything, and incentives/obligations for meeting those deadlines, or it just isn’t going to happen! Elizabeth and I, along with a few other solid members, were able to keep the structure we’d worked hard to create, but the toxic culture had already killed group morale and we lost a lot of members simultaneously. That was a sad and scary time for Square Carousel, but I didn’t want to go out on a sour note. So the small group of us picked the pieces back up again, did a little refocus on our goals as a collective and created an “Admin” so Elizabeth and I didn’t have to carry the entire burden alone. I am forever grateful to Sayada and Jordan for stepping up into these roles to help us get the train back on track. Sayada especially picked up a lot of responsibilities that a newer member shouldn’t have to worry about, and was a total rockstar for Square Carousel. I wish we’d had her with us for the whole ride. I’m so happy that we’ve had a few really great years with some really loyal and talented artists to round out the experience at Year Ten.  There is nobody I’m more thankful for than my Good Cop, Elizabeth, though. She was so reliable, always able to provide balance in our leadership roles, and such a wonderful shoulder to cry on when things got too stressful. Elizabeth, thank you for this journey and for being my SC Wife all these years! It’s so funny because of all the original members, you were one of the only ones I hadn’t really known from SCAD classes, yet you’re the SCAD Illustration friend I have remained most connected to most consistently. Nothing bonds you quite like running an illustration collective does! It also cracks me up that in all these years, we hadn’t ever facetimed or talked on the phone until a few months ago--I didn’t even know your mannerisms or voice, but knew you so well anyway. My greatest internet friend! I love you dearly and it truly won’t feel right, the absence of our weekly SC conversations. Thank you for all of the memories! As just a member and artist, this group has helped me grow so much professionally. It was my client when I didn’t have clients. It was my motivation to paint when I didn’t feel creative. It was my source of portfolio-worthy work, but also my safe place to experiment and fail when I was trying something new. The girl who started as a Square Carousel member freshly graduated in 2011 was working part-time at Urban Outfitters, had basically no money, and no clue how to promote herself. The “studio” was a corner of the bedroom and nobody took her seriously. But a stubborn dedication and the security, purpose and structure of Square Carousel helped the slow change from that lost girl to a full-time freelancing woman. Now, in 2021, I have been doing freelance illustration fully for six years, through contract jobs, editorial, publishing, advertising, commission and local work, as well as selling prints and products online, in local shops and events. I am not making the big bucks, certainly, and I still have goals I’m working towards, but damn, if that isn’t a glow-up, I don’t know what is. Thank you for helping me achieve my impossible dream, Square Carousel, and always being a place with the right amount of advice, support and critique. Ten years, 34 artist interviews, 38 artists, and 144 challenges. I’m the only member to have completed every single one. 144 illustrations through the years. Some were game-changers for my style and my portfolio. Some were total stinkers and I hope you don’t go looking for them. But all were an important step in my career.   So, in ten more years? I’ll be 42 years old, which is very weird because I have never imagined myself that old before... it’s hard to honestly say what that would look like, especially considering the world we are currently living in and how the last 4/5 years have proven that anything (awful) can happen. Jordan and I have a goal to move to Colorado in the next 4 or 5 years, and I’d love to have a little A-Frame in the mountains with a loft studio, shown in my illustration here. Texas has become extremely problematic, especially after the winter storm in February of this year, and will be impacted greatly by climate change, both environmentally and economically. Right now, Austin is still booming, but at some point the lack of foresight in this state’s government is going to screw over the residents and it will be one of the places from which climate refugees run. Is that tomorrow? No, obviously not. But I want to already be settled someplace more stable, having grown some roots, before other folks start to roll in. But, to be able to do that, I need to rely less on my local jobs and connections and be able to have an “anywhere career.” So right now I am focusing on expanding in that way, particularly with book cover illustration and design. I’ve been doing a lot of portfolio work and self-publishing jobs, and hope to get an agent that can shop my work to big-time publishers sometime in the next year or two. Let’s say I succeed at all of those things in five years-- we’re in our Colorado A-Frame, I’m illustrating book covers (and I’ve also convinced my parents to come with me, and maybe a couple friends!). The next five years after that? I don’t know... hopefully a lot of adventures. Hopefully a lot of cool jobs, but also a lot of work/life balance. Right now, I don’t want kids, so the A-Frame will be filled with cats. Maybe we’ll have an old camper van for regular road trips around the western National Parks. I’d love for my work to reflect those passions-- more jobs with outdoor brands, parks, organizations. More book covers for stuff I’d personally love to read and keep on my overflowing shelf. That’s the vague goal for me in ten years, but I don’t want to plan any further than that, because life just also needs to happen the way it’s going to happen. There are parts of my current life I planned for in 2011... and there are parts I never, ever would have guessed. I hope there’s some fun surprises in 2031, too. Thanks for the decade, Square Carousel. Joining illustration collectives will always be the first bit of advice I give fresh graduates. Caitlin

[suzanneshannon]

A Beginner’s Journey to Launching a Website

In September 2018, I was just a few months into my journey of learning web development. As I'm sure is the case with many new developers, it was a big task for me to learn not only the basic skills required, but also keeping current with the fast-moving industry. Just as I was getting to the level where it felt as though I could build a simple website, I started to realize that it was only the first step.

Opening up a few HTML pages stored locally on my laptop felt like a million miles away from being able to say to someone, "Hey, check out my website, live on the actual internet!"

But I did it! And the best part is that it wasn't as scary, difficult or expensive as it first felt like it'd be.

It all started with me sending Chris an email, which he used to write an awesome article explaining everything in plain English.

At this point, I didn't have a fully coded website — just an idea for a basic site that I was using to teach myself as I went along. I used the ongoing progress of my site as a push to learn how to get a live website quicker. But I'm sure you could do the whole thing with an HTML document that just says "Hello, world!"

I built my site using Gatsby, a static site generator powered by React. Building a website with these tools in a modular way felt really natural to me. The concept of reusable parts is something I’m familiar with in my career as a physical product designer and mechanical design engineer. It means that you can build in stages, like Lego, brick-by-brick, until you eventually have a life-sized castle you can invite your friends to visit!

This isn't a guide. It's my personal experience in the process of getting a website from my laptop to being live on the internet. Hopefully it'll give you some hope that it's possible and achievable, even by someone who has no formal training in web development and who has only been doing it for 12 months!

Domain registrars

Before I ever bought a domain, it seemed like a pretty serious thing to do. Owning a domain means being responsible for it. People will go to that address and eventually see content that you've put there.

I don’t know if everyone has the same experience, but I spent weeks deciding on a domain name before going for it. It almost became an obsession of mine for a while, searching online for acronym generators to try and be clever, spending hours on dictionary.com trying to find synonyms that were cool. In the end, I settled for my name and what I do: joshlong.design. I still smile a little when I see my name in the address bar.

Since reading Chris' article, I've actually bought two domains from two different providers: a .com and a .design. I realize that I went against Chris' advice of consolidating domain names at a single registrar, but I needed to shop around a bit to get a good deal on my .design domain. I only own two domain names — and one of them I don't actually have any plans for just yet — so keeping on top of where I bought them isn't a task. In fact, I don't remember the last time I needed to login and manage the domain I use on a daily basis!

Buying a domain name was as simple as any other online shopping transaction. Nothing really huge or scary about it. I bought my .com through Namecheap, and my .design through Google Domains, and the process was pretty similar for both. All they needed was my name, address and payment details. Pretty standard stuff!

I don't remember Google trying to sell me a load of extra packages. They seemed happy with me just buying a domain, though they did offer me free WHOIS protection which I snapped up because I didn’t want my contact details freely available for anyone who’s feeling nosey. However, as Chris warned might happen, the other registrar I went through tried really hard to sell me some extras like hosting, email, a VPN (whatever that is!) and SSL certificates.

Google Domains checkout is happy just to sell the domain name.

Namecheap tries to sell you all the additional services they offer before getting to the checkout.

I didn't go for any of those extras. I already had a hosting plan, and you can use an alias through Gmail to "fake" having a me@mycoolsite.com email address. I honestly have no idea why I'd need a VPN, and the hosting I was going to go for gave me a free SSL certificate through Let's Encrypt. So just the domain name, please!

Hosting

As Chris suggested it would be, choosing a host was a tad trickier than choosing and buying a domain name. But in the end, the web technology I used to build my site kind of guided me in a particular direction.

My site is built with Gatsby, which means it outputs straight-up static assets, basically as HTML and JavaScript files. That means that I didn't need a host that offered a server (in my most super smart authoritative voice), especially for WordPress with a MySQL database and Apache server, 6 cores @ 3.6 Ghz, 4GB RAM, 5TB bandwidth, 5 IP Addresses and 500GB SSD Storage, etc.

All that jargon goes straight over my head. All I wanted to do was upload my files to the internet and go to my domain to see them all compiled and shiny. Should be easy, right?

Well it turns out that it actually was that easy. As there's been so much hype around it recently, I thought I'd take a look at Netlify.

Netlify is recommended by Gatsby. They have really good documentation, and for my uses I felt as though I could comfortably stay within the free tier that they offer. In fact, at the moment I'm using 0.08% a month of the total bandwidth the free tier offers. Winning! Although maybe that means I’m not doing enough to get people to my site...

A quick aside about GitHub: I'm no expert at it and I don't really know any of the etiquette it entails. All I did was sign up, create a new repository and follow the instructions that they give you. After that, every time I made a change to my site, I used the buttons in my code editor (VS Code) to commit and push my changes. It works, but I have no idea if it's the correct or best practice way of doing it! I'm starting now, though, to understand how to use Git through the command line. I had no idea at all how to do it when I started, but I still muddled through it — and you can too!

Back to Netlify.

I signed up for an account (no credit card details required) and added a new site to Netlify by telling it about the GitHub repository where it was stored. When you’ve connected your repository, you can watch Netlify doing its thing deploying your site.

Part of the Netlify’s deploy process is that it shows your website going live in real time. That’s useful for debugging if something goes wrong, or just to watch and get excited like an impatient puppy waiting for a biscuit.

You also get a deploy summary to quickly see what files were uploaded during deployment.

After my site was deployed to the randomly generated URL Netlify gives you, I followed their instructions for adding a domain I had registered elsewhere. They make it so easy!

I assume the instructions will be different for different hosts, but basically, Netlify gave me some server addresses which I then had to go back to my domain registrar to enter them in. These addresses are referred to as nameservers, so look out for that word!

Netlify gives you your nameserver addresses and super easy to understand documentation to set them up with your domain registrar

Once I entered my Netlify nameservers into Google Domains, Google knew where to look to send people who type my domain name into their browser’s address bar. All I had to do after that was wait for some internet magics to happen in the background. That took around three hours for me but can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 24 hours from what I hear.

After that was done, I could type my shiny new domain name into the address bar and — just like that — I'm looking at my own site, hosted live on the internet!

Content Management Systems

The world of Content Management Systems (CMS) is vast, and confusing, but it can also be completely irrelevant to you if you want it to be. I felt so liberated when I realized you don't have to worry about it. It was one less thing in my list of things to do.

My Gatsby site posts and pages (my content) was just a directory of markdown files and my CMS was my text editor. Chris and Dave talked about the idea of this in a recent episode of ShopTalk Show.

My website content is managed right in my text editor, VS Code.

Because I wanted to have a standard structure for different types of posts and pages, I eventually started using NetlifyCMS which is an open-source CMS which can be included in your site real fast. (Chris also did a video recently about NetlifyCMS for his confer-reference site... see what I did there?!) Now I can create blog posts and drafts from anywhere in the world, straight from my website, as long as I have an internet connection!

The same content managed through NetlifyCMS, which offers a great UI and GitHub integration

Asset Hosting (CDNs)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN), as Chris explained in his article, is basically somewhere on the internet where you store the files you need for your website to run, HTML, CSS, images, etc. When your website needs them, it goes to the CDN and grabs the files for your site to use.

From what I've read, it's good practice to use a CDN, and because of the hosting decision I made, it's not something I have to worry about - it's included by Netlify as standard, for free!

Netlify has it's own CDN where all of the files for your website are stored. When someone goes to your website, Netlify goes to its CDN and grabs the files. It's amazingly quick, and makes your site feel so much smoother to navigate.

It's a long journey, but you can do it!

There was a point, before I set off on the journey of getting my website live, where I tried to convince myself that it's fine to just have local websites, as my career isn’t in web development. The reason for that was because the path felt like it would be difficult, long and expensive.

In fact, it was none of those things! You could get a website live on the internet for £0.99 (~$1.25 for you Americans) or less if you find a deal on a domain name. The domain name was my only expense because for the path I took for hosting, asset management and content management.

At a super basic level, the path looks like this..

Code > Buy Domain > Find/Buy Hosting > Update Nameservers > Upload Code > Live!

If you happen to use the same vendor to buy your domain name and your hosting, you can skip the nameserver step. (Netlify sells domains too!)

It's definitely possible for anyone to get their website live on the internet. There's a process that you need to follow, but if you take your time, it can be relatively straightforward. It's a really wonderful feeling, getting a thing you built in front of people, and it's honestly something that I thought I'd never be able to do. But it's certainly within everyone's reach!

Something I've come to really admire over this process (and thousands of Google searches) is the willingness of everyone in the web community to collaborate and help, accepting me and my questions as I tried to learn what I was doing. It's something that I wish was more common in my own industry.

I'd love to hear other people's experiences getting their first website live. What were your pitfalls and triumphs? Was it as scary as it first seemed?

The post A Beginner’s Journey to Launching a Website appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

A Beginner’s Journey to Launching a Website published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/