I had been thinking I should get a website to act as a portfolio for a while now—particularly from going through the headache of the job hunt. There were a few other things that pointed my mind in that direction too: My dad is in the middle of starting a podcast (be sure to check Soft/PowerFul Stories out!) and had asked me to help him figure out a domain registrar and server host. My cousin had made one for himself not too long ago. A friend brought up the topic with some other friends of mine who have computer science degrees, trying to figure out if there was a good way to host the site he coded from scratch for free (there is, via GitHub btw).

And so here I am.

It honestly took longer than I expected to set up. Because I wasn’t satisfied with the freely available options WordPress offered, I figured, “How hard could it be to throw a custom theme together?” And not that there wasn’t difficulty, but the main thing was just how time consuming it was. It took two full days, where this was all I did. And while it might not be the most polished thing ever, it’s mine and I’m happy with it.

The thing I found funniest about the process were what parts actually turned out to give me a challenge. Was it me trying to code the gallery system despite having no prior experience with JavaScript? Nope, that wound up working first try, and it’s the part of the site that feels like it works the best. But I lost sleep over me not seeing that there was one too few closing </div> tags.

I’m hoping I did enough work to future-proof everything I might need/use this site for. But that’s the one thing I couldn’t really test for. Only time will tell, but fingers crossed.

Now it’s just a matter of getting stuff onto the portfolios…