Creating a Website

From soup to… soup

Mike O’Brien

2024-03-15

Why a website?

Warning

These are opinions!

Publish or perish.

But what is “publishing”?

Publishing?

Peer-reviewed manuscripts

Digital Scholarly Journals are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles Eve 2024. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Warning

58.38% of works were present in at least one archive. 27.64% were seemingly unpreserved.

Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied.

Publishing ?

  • Blogs
  • Final Reports
  • Indexed by Google Scholar and other aggregators
  • Can attain DOI (persistance)

Why a website?

  • Communication

    • more people have phones than computers, especially in underprivileged communities (2020 US Census)

  • Lasting; take it with you when you go

  • Professionalism

    • You are going to be “Googled”

Setting up a website

Purchase a domain

Domain Name System (DNS)

  • Under the hood, websites are named with gibberish, also known as an IP address (“Internet Protocol”)
    • IPv4: 192.168.1.1
    • IPv6: 2400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2
  • DNS translates this to something readable
    • myawesomefilsssite.com

DNS Records

DNS Records

Type Name Content
A awesomesite.com 123.456.7.8
AAAA awesomesite.com 1234:abc5:1234::abc
CNAME subdomain (www) wheremysiteishosted
TXT web_verification Yes, this is actually me!

Nameservers

Tell the world what server holds the other records.

Type Value
NS ns.examplens.com
  • I use Cloudflare as it has a good bit of protections and services for free.
  • Including email forwarding!!
  • Involves changing the nameserver listed with your provider to Cloudflare and verifying

Verification

What is a website?

  • A folder with files in it

  • Three challenges:

    • Creating the stuff that goes in the folders (website development)
    • Making sure other people can see the stuff (web hosting/content management system)
    • Making sure other people can’t mess with the stuff (cyber security)

Pick a web hosting service

Pick a web hosting service and design

Email

[email protected] 🙃

Maybe… this could be more professional.

Assuming you’re using GMail and Cloudflare:

Set up Cloudflare

Adjust DNS settings as noted above to switch website to Cloudflare

Set up email forwarding

Email > Email Routing > Routing Rules > Create address

Make Google key

Manage Google Account > Security > Two-step verification

Make Google key

App passwords

Make Google key

Create a new app name, it will provide a password. Copy this; you’ll never see it again!

Set up forwarding

Accounts > Send mail as > Add another email address

Set up forwarding

Put your new forwarding email in the “Email address” box.

Set up forwarding

Paste the app key made above into the “Password” box.

Time check

Soup to nuts?

Register domain

Register with Cloudflare

Register with Cloudflare (free)

Change Nameservers

Change Nameservers

Change DNS settings to point to GitHub

Instructions here

Create Quarto website

Make website: https://quarto.org/docs/websites/

Push website to GitHub: https://quarto.org/docs/publishing/github-pages.html

(If you need to get set up with Git, which can be a pain, follow the guides here: https://happygitwithr.com/)

Add CNAME

Add CNAME file to root of directory and push to GitHub.

Add custom domain

Ta-da! 🎉