In the last days I had a few more spare time and decided I could create a site for my own.
It all started from the idea that it is a bit hard as a simple citizen in my country to see if there is still emergency state or not so I decided to create a site containing this specific information.
Looking on the internet for different hosting solutions and Firebase Pricing (google.com) caught my attention allowing static content to be hosted for free with small usage limits. I am only a backend developer so I had no fronted experience so it was easy for me just to create a simple static site. Since the subject of my site is not that hot, I was not worried at all about the hosting limits imposed by the firebase free plan. So I started from here.
- I decided about a hosting method that allowed me to have a site up within minutes of configuration.
Actually this may have taken me about an hour, because I had no prior experience to firebase, but the tool is easy to use for deploying a simple site, and the instructions helped a lot. - I chose the type of the site I wanted to create — a static one.
In order to have a product as quick as possible, getting knowledge about the frontend side of software development and stick to a free pricing plan, I decided to have a very simple site, at least at first. So I went for a static site, which is only made up of static content like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. - I looked for the way to achieve a cool appearance of the site with a minimum requirement of knowledge and time/effort.
In order to achieve this, I went to get bootstrap and designed my site based on one of their examples. Deciding to go for one of the bootstrap examples was the best choice for me because I wanted a fine looking background as a starting point. And using their examples is very easy, without needing a lot of changes.
To give you an example, it took me more to find bootstrap and their examples as a starting point, as I first looked at a lot of designing tools, rather than make the site looking the way I wanted. - Bonus: I bought a domain, so it would feel more personal
Firebase provides you with a URL that looks mainly the way you would want your domain to look like, but it also has that confusing extension at the end like your-cool-domain-{random-numbers-and-letters}.web.app and it does not seems like a trustful site at all. So I went for my own domain.
The easy part was buying a domain from a domain provider. It was harder for me to realize that the domain providers sometimes do not offer DNS hosting, so I had to go and chose a DNS hosting provider. For me CloulDNS did the job, it was pretty easy to use and it met my main criterion: it was free. Then I could add nameservers and the A records that Google needs to verify the ownership of the domain. Getting knowledge of this was maybe the most difficult part, but I enjoyed it and the result of my work.
The result
If you want to see what I achieved after about a day of work and it was quite a lot of work at least for me, you can go to starea-romaniei.ro where you can read if Romania is still in the state of emergency/alert or not, and for how long it is staying that way.
In the end, if you want to visit Romania, you will need a Covid-19 negative test as we are still in state of alert (haven’t you checked the site? :) but there are a lot of amazing things to see so it’s really worth it. Below, for your delight only, there is a picture from one of our most popular roads. Enjoy!
Feel free to give any feedback on the article or the site as well and ask me any questions that cross your mind regarding the approach that I followed building the site.
Thank you!
