fentybit

Posted on Apr 14, 2021 • Edited on May 9, 2021

My First Personal Site! 📣

#html #css #javascript #netlify

I can not believe that I have 2 months left with Flatiron School, and hopefully by then I can officially call myself a Full-Stack Software Engineer. 👩🏻‍💻

Aside from revamping my resume, I have been working on building my personal site. After weeks of debating if I should be building from scratch or not, I decided to deploy my first portfolio site from a ready-made HTML5 template. I can always refine my portfolio site later as I develop more skills, and eventually design my own UI components.

Starting Point
Not sure where to start, I looked for advice from freeCodeCamp. I found this tutorial of How to Put a Website Online, and it was extremely useful in providing guidance for someone (like me) who has no knowledge on buying a custom domain, hosting and outsourcing a template. I had fun perusing through Pixelarity where you can browse HTML responsive template designs. Basic skills required include HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The next step was trying to figure out my custom domain. Funny thing, this effort frustrates me the most, and I could not make up my mind. Long story short, I ended up re-branding myself to @fentybit, and settled on fentybit.me. I love numbers, and hence, bit or binary digit. Then, I mulled over .dev and .me for quite some time. I learned from other developers and their thoughts on .dev domain, and I settled on .me. I want my site to personally share who I am and what I am, in the most minimalistic way. I am glad the custom domain was still available. Thank you Namecheap.

Personalize your Site
Personalizing HTML/CSS attributes and content delivery took most of my time, but Pixelarity made it so effortless! If there is anything new, it would be trying to link my contact page so other devs can communicate back to me. Formspree provides this service. I only need to submit their API to my front-end code, and they take care of the rest. 📝

Namecheap && Netlify
While there are a lot of hosting providers such as Bluehost, GoDaddy, Hostinger, DreamHost and so on, you can always get free ones from either Netlify or GitHub pages. I had success initially deploying with GitHub pages, though my site resulted being "Not Secure" on Chrome. I made another attempt on setting up my domain with Namecheap and Netlify. Starting with Namecheap to configure the DNS settings > Manage. Under Nameservers category, I had to update from Namecheap Basic DNS to Custom DNS.

Reroute to my Netlify Domain Settings real quick to add my custom domain.

The next step would be to select Set Up Netlify DNS. I would need to acquire a list of Nameservers from Netlify and propagate on Namecheap.

Copy all of Netlify's DNS servers to Namecheap Nameservers, and click the green check button to save this setting.

While I was not able to figure out the SSL/TLS certificate with GitHub pages, I learned Netlify will provision Let's Encrypt certificate automatically once the DNS configuration on the custom domain pointing to Netlify's servers. Namecheap suggests revisiting your site in 24 - 48 hours once Netlify's DNS fully propagated.

It's official. Now I have a personal site! 💥
Check out https://fentybit.me/!

[**fentybit**](https://fentybit.me/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/fentybit) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/fentybit) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/fentybit/)

Latest comments (60)

Ilia539 • Apr 23 '21

Молодец.

TwitchStorm • Apr 21 '21

well done !

Tapajyoti Bose • Apr 21 '21 • Edited

Really love the sleek design. But you should keep an eye out for the contact form, the input validation logic is missing (anyone can submit an empty form).

Checkout my portfolio at: tapajyoti-bose.vercel.app/ (shameless self-promotion 😛)

Ps: best of luck for the remaining months at the bootcamp

fentybit • Apr 21 '21

I fully agree with you. I have been meaning to go back, and insert .js to fix this validation logic. Is that what you did to yours?

Tapajyoti Bose • Apr 21 '21

I'm using react, the validation is handled on form submit

jscalderon65 • Apr 20 '21

You can made your portfolio dynamic, something i did, was make a configuration dashboard on my portfolio, i can access it through a simple authentication, and in that side, get my repositories through the GitHub api and choose what i wanna show on the client.

Astrit • Apr 20 '21

Great job, for the first site this is amazing 🤘

Lelinta • Apr 19 '21 • Edited

Haha, my personal website lelinta.com is made with shopify, don’t worry about anything, just the domain name is fine

Charles McQuain • Apr 19 '21

I think this is a fantastic looking portfolio website. Love the layout, and you did a really good job showing off your projects/skills, and I thought your resume was great!