The Launch

Packaging everything up and getting the website live

The launch

Holy cow everything is designed and built. So far, everything has been built to function locally on my computer. But how the heck does this thing get into the world so everyone can see it?

The internet

Everyone uses it. I'm willing to bet you're using it right now. It's mostly magic, but in terms of launching a website into the world there are a handful of ways to make your dreams come true.

For A Month Learning, I used a few tools to make it the site you can visit today. The services were Google Domains, Github and Netlify.

Google Domains is what I used to buy, well, the domain name—www.amonthlearning.how. GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It lets you take the code from your computer and push it to a spot accessible by anyone. That enables services like Netlify to access that code. As a reminder, Netlify is is a platform that does a ton of stuff around automating web projects. Netlify can take the code from Github and deploy it so it is accessible on the domain that we got from Google Domains. And it's as simple as that. Web development is easy peasy.

I'm leaving a lot of foundational stuff out of here about how all of these things link up. If you're really curious about the protocols happening behind the scenes, I recommend giving this MDN article a read about how the internet & web works.

There are also a whole number of different ways to actually get something to launch into the world—these services just happen to be what I'm comfortable with and they all work nicely together with all the technologies from the previous post.

We're live!

To make sure everything came out of my head right, I got a gut check from a few people in my life to make sure everything works. Remember when I said I didn't do research two posts ago? Well I lied, this counts. A crucial part to any web project is to have people stress test it on different devices, browsers, wifi connections, whatever you can in order to see if it works in the wild as well as it does on your computer.

That's a wrap. We did it, Joe. We successfully built a blog from scratch, got it to launch into the world, and wrote about it.

Next post I'll do a retro on how I think things went, what I learned and what I achieved. After that, the sky is the limit. There is so much to learn and this is just the beginning.