How to put an HTML page on the internet
One thing I love about the internet is that it’s SO EASY to put static HTML websites on the internet. Someone asked me today how to do it, so I thought I’d write down how really quickly!
just an HTML page
All of my sites are just static HTML and CSS. My web design skills are relatively minimal (https://wizardzines.com is the most complicated site I’ve developed on my own), so keeping all my internet sites relatively simple means that I have some hope of being able to make changes / fix things without spending a billion hours on it.
So we’re going to take as minimal of an approach as possible in this blog post – just one HTML page.
the HTML page
The website we’re going to put on the internet is just one file, called index.html. You can find it at https://github.com/jvns/website-example, which is a Github repository with exactly one file in it.
The HTML file has some CSS in it to make it look a little less boring, which is partly copied from https://example.com.
how to put the HTML page on the internet
Here are the steps:
- Make a Github repository with 1 file in it, called
index.html. - Make a Netlify account and set up a new site connected to the Github repository. Pick all the default settings.
- Give your website a name in Netlify
- You’re done! The Github repository I linked to above is on the internet at https://julia-example-website.netlify.com/, if you view source you’ll see that it’s the same HTML as in the github repo.
other options
This is definitely not the only way – Github/Gitlab pages is just as easy, but I like that with Netlify it’s a tiny bit more straightforward to choose the name for your site (with Github I believe you need to make a Github organization if you want a something.github.io name that’s different from your Github username).
If you want to actually use your website for a Real Thing and not just to play around you probably want to buy a domain and link it to your website so that you can change hosting providers in the future, but that is a bit less simple.
this is a good possible jumping off point for learning HTML
If you are a person who is comfortable editing files in a Git repository but wants to practice HTML/CSS, I think this is a fun way to put a website on the internet and play around! I really like the simplicity of it – there’s literally just one file, so there’s no fancy extra magic to get in the way of understanding what’s going on.
There are also a bunch of ways to complicate/extend this, like this blog is actually generated with Hugo which generates a bunch of HTML files which then go on the internet, but it’s always nice to start with the basics.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2PQKXMt