How my main webpage is set up

Intro

4 years ago, a friend (Saul), kindly helped me put a basic static site on my domain, lettervalue.com.

At the time, I didn’t write anything down about how we did it! So by this point, I don’t remember anything about how it strung together.

My goal for today/this blog post is to reverse engineer how that was set up so I will have more success updating it in the future and I might actually understand it.

Things I know I have:

1. A github repo

2. A project on Netlify

3. free ssl cert - through let’s encrypt set up by Netlify for me (let’s encrypt does not seem to have a login page)

4. DNS settings through my registrar, porkbun

How they fit together

The html and css and images live in the github repo.

The Netlify project configuration has a “Build & deploy” section, under the “Repository” I connect up to my github repo.

Under “Build & deploy” -> “Build settings” has a “Build status” where “Active builds” is selected.

I guess that is what tells it to watch the repo to pick up changes?

Under “Domain management”, there’s a “HTTPS” scetion where the “SSL/TLS certificate” is enabled

Things we did today:

Changed my primary domain in Netlify to lettervalue.com instead of www.lettervalue.com

• it automatically updated my ssl cert to handle that

Changed my A record for lettervalue.com:

• 75.2.60.5 is the magic ip we put for the A record for lettervalue.com
• it’s from this document
• it was pointing to a “nothing found here” google page, so it seemed safe to update it

Updated my netlify settings

• my Build Image had reached end of life, I hit configure and chose an up-to-date one
• same for Node.js

My guess as to how one would do this for a new site

1. set up a github repo with the html and css and images all saved to it
2. create a netlify project and point it at that repo
3. Set the netlify project Build status to Active builds
4. Set up the DNS (this part is differently hard depending on whether you’re setting it up a subdomain - then you just set up an A name for subdomain.domain.com to point to the correct IP(?)) (ok, I don’t really know how to do this.)