I created Just Me myself. Is that complicated? Not really. Or perhaps I should say: it does not have to be complicated. If you have never created your own website before, the whole process can look slightly intimidating from the outside. Domains, hosting, databases, SSL certificates, themes and content management systems — there are plenty of technical terms available to make a fairly simple process sound much more mysterious than it actually is. In reality, most of it comes down to one thing: just doing it.
So, for anyone who has never built a website before, here is roughly how Just Me came into existence.
First, a name
The first step was obviously finding a name. Fortunately, I had already solved that problem. On LinkedIn I have been using Just Me as my “company name” for some time, simply because I work independently and the name seemed to describe that rather well. So Just Me it was.
That also made choosing a domain name relatively easy. The only question was the extension. Should it be .nl, .com or perhaps .eu? Then I came across .website. Well, if you are building a website called Just Me, justme.website seems almost impossible to resist. So that became the domain.
Hugo seemed like a good idea
The next question was what to use to actually build the site. For a while, I seriously considered using a Static Site Generator, and Hugo in particular. I still think the concept is very appealing. You write your articles in Markdown, generate the website and simply upload a new version whenever you publish something. Simple, lightweight and very much in the spirit of having your own small corner of the web.
Initially, things went surprisingly well. I had my first Hugo website running quite quickly. There was only one problem: I did not really like the theme. How difficult could it possibly be to install another one?
Uhm… apparently, quite difficult.
I selected another theme and suddenly found myself dealing with all kinds of technical issues. One problem led to another, and before long my nice little Hugo experiment had turned into a troubleshooting exercise. I have not given up on it, by the way. I still want to understand Hugo properly, so I will continue experimenting with it. But at the moment, the score is probably Robbert: 0. Hugo theme: 1.
Back to WordPress
Fortunately, there was an obvious alternative: WordPress. It is open source, I have worked with it many times before and I know my way around it reasonably well. So I logged into my hosting environment and installed WordPress. That took only a few minutes. Connect a database, create an account, choose a password and you are done.
Or so I thought.
When I tried to log in for the first time, Firefox complained that I was trying to use HTTP instead of HTTPS. Fair enough. Setting up SSL is easy, so a few minutes later that problem was solved. I tried again.
Wrong password.
That was strange, because I was absolutely certain I was using the correct username and password. By then it was getting late, so I decided to stop. Perhaps I had simply overlooked something. Tomorrow morning, with some coffee and a fresh brain, everything would probably work.
It did not. Same problem.
Time to call a human
My regular technical assistant, Mistral Vibe, came up with several potentially useful suggestions. They also went much further technically than I thought should be necessary. Surely logging into a freshly installed WordPress site could not be that complicated?
So I swallowed a little bit of technical pride and called the hosting company’s helpdesk. I had mentally prepared myself for a long wait, but two minutes later I was talking to an actual person. That alone already felt like a small victory.
He agreed that the situation was strange. I could hear some muttering and sighing at the other end of the line, and at one point he consulted a colleague. Eventually, he solved the problem by creating a new password for me. And suddenly it worked. There it was: WordPress, the dashboard and, most importantly, access to my own website.
Finally, I could start blogging.
Learning by doing
There was another nice detail. The support guy also explained how I could change that password myself if I ever needed to do so directly in the database. You have to dig reasonably deep into phpMyAdmin, which sounds much more frightening than it actually is. Once you understand roughly what you are looking at, it is quite logical.
And that is perhaps one of the main things I like about creating a website yourself. You do not need to know everything before you start. You learn things because you run into them. A domain teaches you something about DNS. WordPress teaches you something about databases. SSL teaches you something about certificates. And a stubborn Hugo theme teaches you patience.
Most importantly, you end up with something that is genuinely yours.
Just Me is now my own little place on the IndieWeb. A place where I can write about technology, digital autonomy, sustainability, music, space, personal knowledge management or whatever else happens to interest me that day. It does not need an algorithm, a publishing strategy or a social media platform deciding who gets to see it. It is simply my website.
And, appropriately enough, it is called Just Me.