In this post I’ll sound so miser (Bahili kama mchaga) but I am not that kind of, this website/blog costs me just 25,000 Tsh (around 11 USD) a year, hosting + .com domain name which is emineysprince.com. I am not that way miser but I felt a push from my mind to create something different from my late website which was costing me 120,000 Tsh (around 53 USD) a year for hosting and domain name inclusive. That was too much money for me by the way, because I was just blogging on it, with no AddSense, so it was unusefully idea at a time for that cost.
My desire was to have a dynamic website which I can use it to post my staffs like this in my own blog. I started to think and work on the idea, Firstly I ask my friend Oscar Ollotu where should I get the cheepest .com domain name ? He answered me that, there is many of the service provider in Tanzania, but it cost 35,000 Tsh (arround 15 USD) for .com domain. But I felt it was also too much cost, so I dicided to look for the cheepest one else where. It came an idea that, let me buy a domain name without DNS which cost 25,000 Tsh from Extream Webhosting Tanzania.
But the problem came, no website with without DNS setting. How I found free DNS for my domain name ?. I search it on google and I found this tool Cloudflare to resolve a DNS settings for my domain name.
After having a domain name with DNS generated in Cloudflare, now how to have a really dynamic website. I came across with many free web hosting like 000webhosting and many others, but they didn’t give me a freedom that way I ll enjoy my things up. But I finaly I meet my lovely friend github, GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service. It offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Github gives a way to create a Static website which is GitPage.
Ok now I have a git page, but is a Static web page, because Github doesn’t allow the databse environment on gitpages. So I have to think on making my gitpage a Dynamic website.
All of those process is kind of boring thing, but only if you are kind of a person who don’t care on spending much while there is a shourtcut to avoid it. Ok, how my Gitpage now become a dynamic website. I read about Jekyll, Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator for personal, project, or organization sites. Written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder, it is distributed under an open source license. Once I knew Jekyll has got Ruby staffs on it, I was so much interested because I LIKE RUBY than any other programing languages, I was Inspired to learn Ruby with my Teacher @Mtabe.
I use Jekyll to make things up and I got a dynamic webpage. Ok, its already a dynamic webpage, but to publish thing on it it just a complex staff you may not be interested to hear about.
To do this is like hacking ideas, what you are doing is accessing your repository away from github and publish post to your post file on github. I am using this tool Prose, Prose is a content editor for GitHub designed for managing websites. Just create account and authorize access to your github account and make things happen that simple.
I think this gonna be helpfully to you if you want to have a website/blog and you want to blog like an hacker, if facing any problem just leave a comment or just halla me on twitter @emineysprince