GXLink, Behind the Scenes / Part 1: Coding the Site

Alright. Picture this, You’ve just lost your old site, be it through what ever means that lead up to this being the case, or your just tired of looking at a white plain background HTML Site.

You Look at your solutions, and you look at your past experience. then you look for what you want it to look like.

This was me, Around 1.75 Weeks ago, when GLXN-Server Died and I had lost a sizable chunk of Data, Storage Capacity, and a Server.

After bringing up what I could immediately, the Mail Server, some Game Servers, some Docker Containers that relied on a external MySQL server, I now had to think about what I had to do next.

I weighed my options. I could create another express.js Web Server, build everything from the ground up again, and create everything myself again. the upmost freedom, but the most amount of work for something I didn’t actually update that much, and I could go without being to create a whole front end and back end just for something that was essentially just a Static Site.

I could go with a CMS, but Wordpress never has, and maybe will never play well with my home network, since I can never find out how to correctly let Wordpress focus on the domain and not the local IP Address of the Site. I’ve Tried Multiple Times. Drupal Worked, but honestly The fact that I was stuck on themes I wasn’t fond of turned me off quickly. I could have used this, but when running it on Relentless, The Secondary Server I had, it had become slow after having all of the work put onto it instead of it being balanced between GLXN-Server and it, and I really didn’t want to have the system freeze again, les one of the servers randomly decided to nuke Portainer, making me lose all of my Containers, again.

Then there was Jekyll. I’d heard of it before, but never used it myself until this point. I’d seen what it could do with https://melankorin.net/, a clean site, a clear theme that makes it distinguished. something about the black and white aesthetic, the small things like how the logo has it’s own section separate from the nav and the content, and the footer resides on the opposite side, I like it a lot. It’s Like Beatmania IIDX Themes in a way. (Personally, i like the 25 August 2022 and Blue Abomination time machine instances.)

The thing that really pushed me over the edge was what Emma from Halley Labs had to say about things when I had posted to their SlowChat, trying to get a definite answer on what I should use.

Here’s the Exchange I had with them.

You should check them out, And Their Music.

So, I took a step back. I had realized that I hadn’t really figured out what exactly I wanted out of the site, and I was just cutting towards “What Could I Use” before asking myself “What did I need”, and like they said, I was not having a great time.

I decided to sit down, and actually draw what my ideal site would look like. I knew it wouldn’t be like the ideal site, but I wanted to get a base Idea of what I truly wanted, once again cutting back to Kori, which has a guide on how to make your own personal site.

Read The Full article here.

Now, I know that I like Robots, and the Aesthetics, and even though I was never going to be on the level that I would need to make it happen, I still wanted a mix between The Old 2000’s Era Web Mixed with some Modern Aspects, and thus, I came up with this.

Pictured: GalexionLink’s Idealized form.

Honestly Maybe I was a bit over ambitious, but you can see a core framework being laid out here. the Widgets on the left, the nav items on the right, and What was to be a dual purpose Logo and Marquee. To help illustrate what I was going for a bit better, Here’s a Reference of my logo.

You can kinda see what I was going for, and the Red Color eventually got incorporated into the ticker itself on v2. sure the proportions were off but it still looked nice, at least to me.

also, peep the poorly drawn rendition of a character silhouette being copied and being shoved to the left slowly, its opacity fading, with the words “City Landscape” next to it. There is truly no originality in this world.

Anyways, now that I had an Idea of what I wanted, It was time to convert that Idea into an actual website.

It Took a bit to get Started, The Marquee being the first idea I had tried to implement. Development went semi-smoothly, and I was even able to quickly find and implement the Multi-Blog Function I have pretty Quickly, hence why the site is split up into 3 Distinct Sections.

and now? now we are are here. everything got finalized fairly quickly actually, It’s kinda shocking how fast I was able to theme Jekyll to what I have right now.

But Honestly Coding the site is just one part of the equation, You’ll also need a place to host that site too. Join Me Next Time as I delve into how my server structure works, more viable alternatives, and the fun that was suddenly losing a domain from a free domain provider because of stuff out of their control!

also one thing of note before I go, Visual Studio Code Lied to me. This isn’t Gray, this is Green!

P.S.

I hope you guys don’t mind me slight copying the visual styles of the other two websites I have mentioned here, I Just wanted a neat way to distingush me in my domain from me in other people’s domain.